


What's to be Learned from the End of the World

by FamousWolf



Category: Gotham (TV), Rhett & Link
Genre: Crossover, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2020-09-07 23:33:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 52,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20251018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FamousWolf/pseuds/FamousWolf
Summary: When their tour sells out venue after venue, Rhett and Link decide to bring the show to Gotham, using their work as an opportunity to explore the infamous city at exactly the wrong time.  After a catastrophic attack isolates Gotham from the rest of the country, they are forced to make tough calls and fast friends with some of the city's most notorious residents in order to survive.  But if they want to find a way home, they must strip away their own familiar veneers and embrace some hard truths about themselves, teaching others to do the same along the way.





	1. Prologue

“We made this decision months ago, man. The car is in the driveway; my bags are in it. I’m ready. You’re ready. You can’t help but be a little curious. I mean, the whole town is like east coast high fashion meets…” Rhett trailed.  
Link had no trouble finishing the thought for him: “Crime rates you wouldn’t believe. It’s the most dangerous city in the country, and we’ve never had cause to go. We have no cause now.”  
“We have people waiting to see us. People who paid good money. We can’t just isolate a massive coastal city like that. People will notice.”  
“How much will they notice when we never return?” Link asked without meeting Rhett’s eyes, zipping his backpack and testing its weight on his shoulder. Rhett was right: he’d already made up his mind. They were going for a week, they had a full stage crew and a guide waiting for them, and they were going to be as fine as they always were when they traveled. He just liked the comfort of this particular argument.  
Rhett chuckled and raised his eyebrows.  
“You want that network deal someday, right? Better bring your camera.”


	2. Touring

A red candle flickered with life in the center of a small table, and every once in a while, Link’s fingers danced over the tip of the flame as he listened to Rhett speak with Roux, the contact they had made in Gotham to work as a local assistant during their shows and a guide to the city’s flashiest (per Rhett’s request) and safest (per Link’s) hot spots and attractions. They’d spent the first two days of their trip lying low, never wandering too far from their hotel in order to conserve energy for the shows they’d scheduled at night. But with the duties of work behind them, they were left with four days remaining in the city, and Roux was helping to make the most of them. They’d enjoyed the observation deck of the city’s tallest building, eaten in more than one restaurant for which Link could not figure out the dress code. They’d visited Wayne Plaza and learned about the famous murders of its namesakes, had lunch on Gotham Pier and completely ignored the docks they had to pass to get there, toured the Gotham Museum of Art and listened to a string of dismissive non-answers when Rhett brought up a story he’d heard a few years back about someone tagging the art in green paint.

It seemed that the second either of them started to catch their breath, Roux was jumping in with a new idea to keep them moving. From the moment they’d met him at the airport, Rhett seemed to love this hummingbird of a man: his eccentric fashion sense and ceaseless chatter about the city he’d never left amused him to no end. He was entertained less by the sights of the city than by this man showing them to him. In the beginning, Link had been in on it, meeting Rhett’s sideways glances whenever Roux would bound into a new building while raising his arms in adoration of some historical significance that was lost on them, or asking irrelevant follow-up questions to Roux’s rambling speeches, which flitted between history and gossip with impressive ease. But after two days of it, Link was growing restless in his presence.

“I’m telling you, you’re ahead of the game,” Roux chirped, head permanently tilted toward Rhett. “You’re so right that open access digital media is the future. We’re so slow to pick up on trends like that, and I don’t know if it’s just the city’s old ghosts trying to keep us convinced that entertainment means foreign film and opera, but it’s great that you’re here. You’re dragging us into the present, you know? Proving that, if you can sell out that theatre two nights in a row, then we really DO have an interest in the modernization of our media. Don’t get me wrong: I love our ties to history here. But we can hold on to our dignity and lean into the future at the same time, you know what I mean?”

“It doesn’t seem possible that you wouldn’t be on the cutting edge in every arena. A force of a city like this?” Rhett said, showing his hand: he’d grown infatuated with the place. He’d come from an urban environment, but this was something different. It was so much edgier, the roots running so much deeper than on the west coast, that he couldn’t help but share in Roux’s enthusiasm. “But I guess that’s the charm, too, huh?”

“I think so. Don’t get me wrong—”

“Can I get anyone a drink?” Link interjected, avoiding Rhett’s face for the frown he knew he’d see there.

“Oh, uh,” Roux paused, turning toward Link and actually looking for the first time, Link realized, directly into his eyes. “You know, I think I’m going to call it a night,” he said as brightly as if he’d planned it all along, as if he hadn’t at all been influenced by the flat line of Link’s lips.

“You sure?” Rhett asked, clapping a hand over his shoulder blade. Roux shook his head and downed the watery remains of his drink.

“I am. I have an early morning tomorrow, anyway. I’d almost forgotten I’d agreed to— well, I just have an early morning, and a long ride home. So, gentlemen,” he said, his tone shifting into one of more gravity. He glanced at them both, confirming that he had their full attention before speaking. “You have the number for the car service, yes?”

“Yes,” they said in unison, with slightly different intonations.

“Wonderful. Please, please use it. No matter the time of night, use that service to travel. Even if it’s just a block, they’ll be happy to take you. Do not walk. It’s too cold for that, anyway,” he added, apparently recognizing the implication of his warning, and how it might taint their view of his beloved city. Still, he seemed to know why he’d been hired.

“I know I said this already, but just as a refresher: It will always be a black SUV, quite spacious. They will ask for confirmation of your ID, and you’ll give them the red number on the back on your card. They should be able to tell you the code written in blue on your card. If they do not or cannot do this, do not get in.”

“Wow,” Link said, despite this being the second time they’d covered this system.

“It’s just a security measure to make sure that we’re not giving away free rides, really,” Roux sighed. Link narrowed his eyes and looked at Rhett, a silent _We’re supposed to believe that?_

“We can handle that. Now, we’re on our own during the day tomorrow, right?” Rhett said, unnecessarily.

“Yes, gentlemen, the city is all yours. We’ve left some suggestions in your rooms, and the concierge will have new cards for the car service. The new codes go into effect at six AM, so you’ll need to be back by then,” he said, laughing at the notion of the two somehow managing to stay awake and party until the next morning. At least, that’s what Rhett seemed to think he was laughing at. Link wasn’t as sure. “But this is the best part. Can I just say that I’ve had this burning in my pocket all day? I almost thought I couldn’t keep it a surprise, but…” Roux beamed, retrieving a matte black business card from his interior breast pocket. He set it on the table between them and tapped it once for good measure, letting them take it in, and waiting for an awe that never came. Link thought maybe reading it aloud would help move things along.

“The…The Iceberg Lounge?” he said, looking to Rhett for an answer he didn’t have. He shrugged.

“Of all the clubs in Gotham, this is easily the hottest. Oh, ha! That’s funny.”

Rhett thought so, too. Link just nodded.

“When your PR people called me looking for some photo ops, I admit I almost panicked. Our scene has been oddly quiet lately. But here,” he said, pointing again to the card, “you’re going to turn someone’s head. I don’t think I could’ve made it happen on a weekend, but mid-week, you’ll still be mingling with the city’s elite. I’d liken it to, say, L.A.’s Avenue or…maybe like the Highlight Room?”

Rhett tried to nod in recognition, but Link wasn’t playing along. They had no idea what Roux was talking about, and he had no problem letting that be known. His blank face spoke for him, and Roux just blinked at him a moment before laughing and waving it all off.

“It doesn’t matter. You’ll enjoy it. It’s everything there is to love about the town all wrapped up in a single building. I pulled some strings, and all you need to do is show this card to the doorman. You’re on the list, and you’ll have a table. There’ll be someone there to snap your photos as you’re entering, and maybe even as you’re leaving. Some planned candids,” he said, rattling off the names of celebrity gossip outlets that could run the photos, should they prove interesting enough. Link swallowed and chewed the inside of his cheek, a clear indication of his slight discomfort at so minutely planning a supposedly-fun trip to a lounge. It was a part of the business that made him want to simultaneously laugh and cringe. 

Roux chattered on, buzzing with excitement for his clients. “And of course, we can arrange some suits for you; most people don’t pack for such an evening when they travel, especially not for work, like you did.”

“Wow. I don’t know what to say, man,” Rhett offered, shaking his head as he pocketed the card. “You’ve gone above and beyond. Thanks a lot.”

“It’s my pleasure. I’ll meet you after breakfast on Wednesday. Until then, enjoy yourselves, and get some rest,” he bid them warmly, smiling extra broadly at Link as he shook his hand over the table. Once he’d disappeared through the heavy wooden doors of the lounge, Rhett let his face fall, a deep sigh escaping him. Link laughed and slapped the table.

“I knew it! There was no way you weren’t losing your mind.”

Rhett shook his head. “Some of us have better manners. He’s doing his best. Gotta admire his energy.”

“If you say so.”

They lingered at their table, letting their conversation wander at will, accidentally discussing their work despite a pre-trip agreement to avoid the subject after the close of their last show. It was an easy topic to fall back when trying to avoid something uncomfortable. As long as they were talking about filming schedules or ticket sales, they weren’t pressured to consider the way the city had been making them feel. They didn’t have to address the electric charge Rhett felt in his chest just driving between buildings that couldn’t decide to which century they wanted to belong. They didn’t have to talk about how he couldn’t help but feel a little thrill at all the safety measures Roux had incorporated into their trip, evidence of just how close to the edge they were walking in spending more than the required tour dates in Gotham. To him, it seemed like a safari, a voyage to some foreign land filled with rare and dangerous creatures that he could observe from the safety of his status. He was not one of them, though a part of him wanted to be.

They weren’t talking about Rhett’s attraction to the city, nor were they considering Link’s repulsion to it. There was plenty to appreciate about a city that felt like an entire world of its own, but most cities did to him. It wasn’t new that the scale of the place was a little overwhelming, or that he felt like more like a tourist on display with every stop at a museum and landmark. He hadn’t faulted Roux for the schedule: it consisted of all the best public attractions the place had to offer. It was a comprehensive checklist of all the shiniest places to visit without ever really seeing the city itself. And that was what bothered him: he knew there was an undertow to the town, and Roux was protecting them from it. He could sense it in the eye contact that he made with strangers standing in the alleys they passed, in the way he could brush shoulders with someone and then find them missing when he turned to look, in the way that so few people walked around staring at their phones. He had been walking around for four days feeling like something was about to happen. And where Rhett called it inspiration, Link was more inclined to call it dread.

But here, in the cocoon of a small uptown restaurant, they didn’t have to talk about it. 

The lights dimmed, signaling a shift in the place’s purpose. The music grew a little louder, and servers focused on offering drinks rather than desserts. The place loosened up and hunkered down simultaneously, and Rhett followed suit by picking up his glass and pushing back from the table.

“A much better table just opened up,” he said, waiting for Link to grab his own drink and follow his lead. They slipped through the thin crowd, weaving around laughing groups and whispering couples until they came to a table at the farthest corner of the room, tucked into the perfect position for one of their favorite activities. 

Rhett sat against the back wall as Link sank into the perpendicular bench, eyes already scanning the darkened floor for interesting characters. 

“This is going to be an expensive night for him,” Rhett said quietly, eyeballing a short man in a blue suit jacket leaning on the bar. Link watched him for a moment, observed his interactions with a svelte blonde, the way his fingertips grazed her wrist when he laughed at some joke, and the way she over-angled her shoulders to include the smiling brunette to her left, a fixed figure at her side who smiled even more widely than her friend, seemingly already in on Rhett’s joke.

“I think you’re right. He ain’t breakin’ those two up, and he doesn’t seem to have a friend.”

“Rookie move.”

Link laughed. “Oh, okay. You’re a master of the game now? When did you get back in it?”

Rhett shook his head, shrugging. “Don’t have to play the game to know the rules.”

They smiled at his faux prowess and took mirroring drinks. Link had reached the bottom of his third cocktail, and the edge he’d had with Roux had softened some, his tongue loosening in his mouth. 

“Over there. Polo shirt. Buzz cut,” he murmured, directing Rhett’s attention to a party of one: a man with wide eyes anchored to the top of his table. “He’s not local, right?”

Rhett considered the man: markedly middle-aged, clothed in safe, solid colors that draped over his frame a little too loosely to be stylish. He stood out in his averageness, and Link could tell Rhett was trying not to glance at their own clothes in comparison. This man looked like someone either one of them could have grown into had they not jumped coasts and careers so many years before.

“I say no. I think he’s here visiting family. A…daughter?”

“Looks about right. I’d be petrified, too, if my daughter lived here. I’d never see her again. I couldn’t come visit.”

“What? Why?!” Rhett balked, and Link could not easily discern whether the question was sarcastic. As if on cue, a choir of sirens began to approach from the next block down, and in perfectly attendant silence, they watched a convoy of cruisers and SUVs race by the window over Link’s shoulder. As they sped down the slick street, Link was careful not to blink as he shifted his gaze from the taillights to Rhett’s face, silently deadpanning all the response Rhett needed. Link spoke anyway, though, relishing the opportunity.

“I don’t know, Rhett. What if I couldn’t afford personal transportation with built-in security redundancies? What might happen to me then?”

Rhett grinned down at his own hands, amused by the rant Link had clearly been preparing.

“What if I hadn’t been able to afford a hotel with multiple security systems? With armed guards at the doors? You did see that when we checked in, didn’t you? I know I saw a holster on that doorman, under his coat.”

“I gotta say, man, you sound more concerned for yourself than your hypothetical daughter. I mean, she’s the one living here,” Rhett replied, voice trailing in a slow drawl. 

“Well, she’s fine. She lives here. Presumably it was her choice, so,” he countered, leaning in to whisper his conclusion, “she’s one of them now.”

Rhett’s eyes widened, and he dropped his hand over Link’s fist in consolation. “I’m sorry for your loss. Such a sweet girl.”

“Real shame.”

“You hate this place for real, huh?” Rhett asked, glancing at the now-quiet street just beyond the tinted window.

Link sank back against the cushion and shook his head, surveying the entirety of the lounge once more. “It’s just too…it’s too cool. Not an LA kind of cool, where you think you have a shot at joining in. It’s just…I don’t know when I last made eye contact with someone I wasn’t paying. No one looks up. Feels like I’m gonna get punched just for glancing at the wrong face. And we couldn’t call the cops: they all just went that way.”

“Who threatened you?”

Link rolled his eyes. Rhett conceded.

“You know, the hotel has a bar. We could just go back. I don’t need any nightlife tonight.”

“It was a long day,” Link added, legitimizing the deal.

“It was a long day. Let’s go.”

“It’ll take half an hour to make sure we have the right car, anyway,” Link muttered, sliding out of the booth as Rhett shook his head and laughed.

Link hadn’t wanted to know how much they’d paid for their car service in the city, but when he’d discovered a bottle of champagne on ice waiting in the back of the SUV, he recognized the two-sided value of such a feature: it could distract passengers from their surroundings and intoxicate them past caring. And at the very least, it made them feel fancy.

Their day had taken them to the outer city limits and the drive back would be long, so Rhett wasted no time in popping the cork. 

They spent the journey scrolling through songs on Rhett’s phone, listening to a minute of each before losing interest and skipping on. They sang along, impersonating famous voices and laughing easily. At first, they’d passed the phone back and forth, but when Link leaned against Rhett to reach for the champagne, he took advantage of the car’s privacy and just stayed there, arm to arm, head nearly resting on Rhett’s shoulder as they gazed into the blue light. Any time Rhett chuckled, he could feel it vibrate through his own bones, which seemed to make everything funnier. Rhett settled easily into the posture, making the most of the vehicle’s legroom by slouching in the seat. Their focus wandered; Rhett let a song play all the way through while he opened Instagram and they scrolled through dozens of photos most recently posted by friends, acquaintances, strangers whose accounts had once seemed interesting. They agreed in a moment of mutual inspiration that they should post a photo of their own before the night grew too late, so Rhett extended his arm and snapped a shot of their faces. They hadn’t needed to plan it: neither smiled in the photo, but instead went for pensive, model-esque expressions, their eyes set on different versions of the middle-distance. These were little moments of magic, spontaneous creations of their shared wavelength, so Link didn’t need to see the caption to be proud of the contribution to Rhett’s collection. While Rhett typed away, he toasted their work privately, emptying his glittering flute. 

By the time they arrived at their hotel, creating momentum seemed like too much work, so they just pulled themselves out of the SUV, laughing at their own tired legs as they wobbled into the lobby, Link using two fingers to lazily salute the stoic doorman and earning a half grin in return, a little victory over this city. To the right of the massive main entrance, soft jazz skittered over the threshold to a dimly-lit bar. It seemed busy for a weeknight, Link thought, a steady stream of cocktail dresses and business suits flowing to and from the marble bar at the back of the room.

“Not an empty table in sight. Who are all these people? Don’t they have to get up in the morning?” he said, slowing his stride as they approached. 

“Do you?” Rhett retorted, though he quickly followed it up with, “Yeah, it is kind of busy.”

Rhett’s interests had dictated the day, so Link had no qualms about vetoing the hotel bar. He shook his head and lifted his hands; Rhett stayed on his heels all the way to the elevator.

They were contentedly quiet as they rode up four floors in a slow car, a feature of the stylishly antiquated hotel. It offered just enough time for Link to recognize that he hadn’t minded the number of people in the bar downstairs; it was the presence of anyone at all that just didn’t sit well. He’d spent days dodging people, trying to keep up with Rhett’s wandering gaze. The privacy of the car was too comfortable to give up now. The thought made him blush a little, silly as it felt. He didn’t think he could articulate it in a way that wouldn’t make Rhett laugh at him. That was okay; he wanted to laugh at himself.

The doors accordioned open and they stepped out, each digging in their pockets for matching brass keys—another vintage feature of the place. Almost simultaneously, their locks unlatched and the doors swayed open, welcoming each into a warm golden glow emanating from mirroring sconces. Before even slipping off his jacket, Link went for the adjoining door and pulled it fully open, only to find Rhett doing the same, the room service menu already in his other hand. 

They spent the remainder of the night in relative quiet, watching the local channels on Rhett’s television while sharing a variety of overpriced appetizers and two final beers from a local brewery, all delivered by a bellhop who Link, despite a lack of any evidence, swore up and down was also armed. They ate and drank at the small wooden table near the window, but the TV was most easily viewed from the bed, so eventually they stretched out on its comforter, Rhett leaning against the headboard, Link lying the opposite direction, propped on his elbows at the foot. They closed the day by allowing themselves to become absorbed in some home renovation show, arguing with the designers and openly disapproving of each other’s suggestions. 

Midnight came and went, the volume was lowered, the lights dropped to a single bedside lamp. Their sporadic chatter died away completely, and in its wake, Link felt the call of his own bed, just around the corner, just through a door he fully planned to keep open. The promise of some much-needed sleep was tempting, but when he thought about pushing himself up, he found that he had at some point made contact with Rhett’s legs: the length of his back was siphoning heat from Rhett’s shins, and in this odd point of contact, they’d generated warmth that he had to talk himself into leaving. He glanced at the head of the bed and found Rhett already sleeping, fallen onto his side and cradling a bright white pillow. 

It would be easy to stay, to dive into whatever sort of sleep awaited in this unconventional position. But it didn’t make sense to want to stay, so Link braced himself for the loss of Rhett’s body heat and pushed himself up, slid off the bed as smoothly as possible, trying to let Rhett sleep, trying to let him wake up on his own to discover that he hadn’t changed out of his clothes, that he hadn’t brushed his teeth, that he hadn’t done all the things that Link just couldn’t bear not doing.

He turned off the TV and returned to his own room. Crossing the threshold seemed to shake him out of his haze. He appreciated the cleanliness of his room, was grateful that Rhett let them wind down in his space. He sped through his routine: washed his face, brushed his teeth, flossed, put on pajamas, silenced his phone. And before slipping into the still-smooth covers of his own bed, he took one last peek into Rhett’s room, one last confirmation that Rhett hadn’t moved, hadn’t woken up to find himself abandoned yet, not that he would mind. Link didn’t really know why he wanted that last look, but travel had the potential to make him fall into strange habits, he supposed. In the absence of a normal routine, he made one up as he went, and apparently, stealing a look at Rhett before bed was now a part of it.


	3. Gratitude

Wrapped in layers of t-shirt, sweatshirt, and blanket, Rhett could bear the frigid morning air and watch from his balcony as the city came to life. Parked cars roared and sputtered awake, disappearing around corners, their vacancies never waiting long for new occupants. A newsstand rolled up its grate and opened for business. Beneath him crossed more paper cups of coffee than he could count, and for each new pedestrian, he imagined a story, dreamed up where they were going and what they’d left behind.   
He yawned, and as the air hit the back of his throat, his eyes watered more than usual. He had never minded the cold, despite its penchant for reviving old aches, but on this particular morning, after realizing he’d fallen asleep in his clothes with Link on his bed, after failing to resist the urge to steal a glance into Link’s room to find him half-uncovered, sprawled in every direction at once, after catching himself turning the stolen glance into an open stare, Rhett felt that the frosty March air was exactly what he needed. He woke up in a daze, but the chill and the people-watching would help him settle back into himself. It was a sort of meditation, an audience with urban quietude.  
Rhett had let himself become so absorbed with the activity on the street that he flinched when the sliding door opened behind him. Link’s face jutted through a narrow opening, frowning in confusion.   
“Why?” Link asked, looking up and down the sight of Rhett’s bundle of blanket.   
“Just wanted some air. Didn’t feel like taking a walk yet. G’morning,” Rhett replied, leaning forward for one last good look over the bronze railing.  
“Good morning. You didn’t eat, right?”  
“No, but I’m starving. Let’s order.”  
“On it.”  
With that, Link disappeared back into the room. Rhett inhaled deeply and held the breath in his lungs, letting it absorb any tension that may have been hiding in his body. As he did so, the screech of car brakes drew his attention to the intersection just south of the hotel. A man in a blue coat was yelling at the driver of a white sedan, slamming his palm against the car’s hood, his shouts accompanied by equally emphatic gestures. The driver’s door swung open and Rhett tightened the blanket around him, facing away from the scene unfolding at street level. He stood, turned, and exhaled, expecting to see his breath ghost toward the glass of the door. But it didn’t. Even his body, a vessel that carried the California sun everywhere it went, could not quite warm the air here.   
Inside, Link was perched in the subtly rotating office chair, just dropping the phone into its cradle on the desk. Rhett hadn’t noticed before that he’d put on a black hotel robe that hung in both of their closets. Its plush collar rose halfway up his neck, sleeves draping from his wrists a bit in the designer’s attempt make one size fit all.   
“Nice robe,” Rhett said, latching the door behind him. Link looked up and chuckled.   
“Finally had a slow enough morning to put it on. Breaks my heart that it took me so long,” he said, drawing his arms cozily to his chest, eye closed in playful bliss.  
This was all the advertisement Rhett needed. He tossed the blanket back on the half-stripped bed and went straight for his own closet.   
Of course, the garment that landed at Link’s calves fell only to Rhett’s knees, its sleeves not quite long enough to cover his wrists. Its shortness was a familiar fit, but he convinced himself quickly that he could be almost as comfortable as Link.   
Immersed in a sleepy morning calm, the room felt both rich with the opportunity to plan the day and simultaneously too lazy to seize it. They scrolled through their phones, each pretending not to check work emails, each resisting the urge to hit ‘reply’ before a whisper of guilt sent them turning down their devices and picking up the brochures arranged on the desk, one on the city’s historical attractions, one on the luxury services offered in the hotel’s spa.   
Rhett had thumbed through his tourist’s guide with great interest, but breakfast soon arrived, distracting him from the city’s faint call, and by the time they were finishing their last intricately-sliced bits of fruit, he’d succumbed to the promises of Link’s spa menu, and the possibility of staying put outweighed any potential excitement beyond their hotel’s front doors.  
A quick phone call to the thirtieth floor booked them two deep-tissue massages, clay facials, and—strictly as a part of a package deal, they said—pedicures to bring the pampering to a close, all beginning within an hour, such availability another perk of their mid-week stay.  
They left early, eager to give themselves over to some capitalist semblance of zen. And they willingly dove into the spa’s New Age atmosphere the second they walked through its frosted glass doors, smiling ironically at the bowls of crystals greeting them at the front desk. They were checked in and set loose about the labyrinth of available pastimes. They followed the scent of sage incense to a locker room and changed from their street clothes into fresh robes of pure white, privately wondering why they’d bothered getting dressed in their rooms at all. And as they roamed the space, bouncing from a room dedicated to guided meditation to one set up for private yoga lessons, they happened across an exterior hallway, a full wall of windows overlooking downtown. It led along the back of the spa and brought them to a wall of frosted glass and a door with “Oxygen Room” etched into its center.  
“What is this?” Rhett half-whispered, testing the door gently. It gave to his hand, and he shot a look of intrigue back at Link, who was already peeking past his shoulder.   
“Oh, I get it,” Link said as he entered this small indoor garden, an approximation of a greenhouse, windows making up two of its four walls.   
They were the only visitors to the room, so Rhett set about studying the myriad plants arranged on tables and shelves of various heights, each contributing a unique verdant shade to the collection.  
Link looked outward for a moment, turning toward the window and gazing over the cloudy city, catching sight of a light drizzle in the contrast of the dark building across the street.   
Rhett briefly searched for a pattern in the arrangements of different plants but gave up the pursuit in favor of lowering onto one of the few floor cushions arranged at the center of the room. He watched Link for a moment, tried to discern what must have caught his attention. A strong wind threw a handful of raindrops onto the glass just in front of Link’s face, and he flinched, pulling his arms around himself and shivering, just once, as he gazed out.   
“Hey,” Rhett finally said, breaking the trance and causing Link to turn away from the window. At the sight of Rhett’s seat on the floor, Link smiled, coming back into the center of the room, his eyes lighting back up the further he stepped from the window.  
The spa had both steam saunas and dry saunas, a vitality pool, and a tea room, but nothing sounded better than waiting out their free time in this private space tucked away at the back of the building. Link dropped onto a cushion of his own and leaned his head back on the sturdy table against which it was propped, careful not to disturb the vines creeping over its edge.   
“It smells so good in here. I’d expect it to smell like…dirt, I guess. More earthy than this,” he said, taking a deep inhale of the warm air.  
“I’m sure they have some serious circulation up here,” said Rhett, letting his eyes start to drift closed as he mirrored Link in leaning his head back, resting against a half-wall. His gaze fell naturally to Link, framed by shoots and leaves draping off the tabletop. The room’s cool colors seemed to complement the contrast between Link’s dark hair and seasonably fair skin. A fleeting thought crossed Rhett’s mind, just beyond the grasp of his freewill: it made sense that the plants should seem to curl in toward Link, should want to bend toward him. He was a natural source of light.  
Rhett swallowed against the odd perception and rolled his shoulders. Link did the same, and in the quiet that followed, their eyes closed easily.  
“I keep thinking about this club tonight,” Link eventually said, inviting Rhett to share his own perspective.  
“What’s to think about?” Rhett asked, already having several answers of his own.   
“Part of me is glad it’s happening, and fully aware that it doesn’t have to be a whole-night thing. It can just be like an hour, right? If it’s not our scene, we can leave as easily as we arrived.”  
“Right.”  
Link sighed. “And part of me feels weird that I didn’t know the firm was contacting Roux. I mean, you didn’t know, did you? Did you just forget to tell me? Or did I miss an email?”  
“No, I never got any information about it,” Rhett replied. He wondered why it felt like a confession, as if he should have had a tighter grip on their itinerary, should have more firmly protected their free days in the city.  
“I’m wondering what these suits are gonna look like. You’ve seen how people dress around here.”  
“Please. You’ve seen how we dress.”  
“Good point.”  
Rhett cracked an eyelid and saw that Link’s right eyebrow had lowered, weighed down by concentration as he tried to convert thoughts into words. To help ease the pressure, Rhett sighed and made an admission of his own.  
“The car system stresses me out.”  
Link’s eyes popped open.  
“I knew it!” Despite the confessions, they were smiling. “It’s so weird! It’s too much to think about!”  
“I’m sure there’s some prestige in being spotted in one of those vehicles, though, so I can roll with it,” Rhett said, privately revisiting the memory of popping champagne. With it came the memory of Link leaning fully against him as they looked at his phone. He could see them clearly, as if from a third-party perspective, the two of them laughing hard enough to shake each other’s shoulders. “You’ll make fast friends tonight,” he said for the sake of saying something. “I’m sure it’ll be good. Just try not to let on how much you dislike their town.”  
Link shook his head with a smile. “Stop saying that. You’re going to talk me into really hating it.”  
Just as they’d closed their eyes again, the door swung softly open, and a petite woman stepped through, smiling down at them. “Gentlemen, your rooms are ready. Shall we?”   
“Absolutely,” Rhett replied, pushing himself up and heading for the exit.   
As Rhett followed the woman out into the hallway, Link followed their lead, pushing himself up from the floor, gently resting his palm on the edge of the table for balance. Once upright, he flinched and gasped through his nose, trying to keep quiet. Though he’d have sworn he’d placed his hand on a bare spot on the table, he’d managed to tangle his wrist in a spiral of two vines, each wrapped in opposing directions, complicating the extrication of his hand. He worked quickly, pushing leaves back to dig his opposite fingertips against his skin and delicately peel the plant off of himself without damaging it in the process.   
Once free, he shuffled out of the room, rubbing his wrist, less from pain than confusion and, more acutely, disbelief.   
  
“Enjoy your afternoon, Mr. McLaughlin.”   
A smiling masseuse closed the door to her room as Rhett took a few steps into the hallway, a dangerously relaxed body unsure of its destination within this maze of corridors. His brain was fuzzy, overdosed by lavender oil and the pleasurable release of hidden knots from major muscles. Something about the air in the place and the over-the-top luxurious way he was choosing to spend his afternoon had mixed with the high of a good massage and left him feeling unabashedly giggly in the dim hall. He didn’t know exactly where Link had gone; he’d been deposited in a massage room first, and he could safely presume that Link hadn’t exited his own yet. So he wandered the empty floor for a few minutes, grazing fingertips along the textured walls and walking with just enough focus that he’d have appeared to have a destination in mind should anyone have crossed his path. The longer he walked, the lighter he felt, openly smiling at the ridiculousness of his roaming and just how impossibly good he felt. He sensed he wouldn’t be able to keep a straight face when Link finally emerged from one of the white doors, but he didn’t care. He was having too much fun.   
This was his favorite sort of adventure. He’d enjoyed traveling with Link, found new, real happiness in the touring experience, but it was always accompanied with the unique stress of performance, of work. He struggled to let go of the anxiety associated with pleasing an audience, keeping his own performances clean and fresh. It was a stress he believed he carried for the both of them, as Link seemed to bounce from show to show with little dip in energy, with little fear of losing his touch. As much as he teased Link for his refusal to live anywhere but in the moment, he often envied that state of mind. He couldn’t achieve it himself unless he felt free of obligation, and between an often breakneck work schedule and an equally busy home life, there seemed no way to achieve it without leaving home simply for the sake of leaving home. They’d worked the first days of the trip, but now, aside from a potentially-entertaining outing to an intriguing club, he was an untethered man in a new world, and the potential opened him up. He loved the freedom, the novelty of every new space, and he was endlessly amused by watching Link experience and process it all in real time.  
So when Link crossed in front of him on a perpendicular path, his face brightened even more, and he almost laughed at seeing a similar blissed-out expression on Link’s face. He was in a daze of his own, following a silent esthetician toward glass double doors, and he turned his head just slightly to register Rhett’s face. He smiled through his haze and held out a hand, catching Rhett on the way by.  
Rhett kept one hand on the wall as he took up the rear of the line, his other hand still loosely holding Link’s. It was a joke of an act, two skeptics laughing at a mystical energy inexplicably running through their veins, but they held hands until they entered the double doors, finding two white facial tables arranged on opposite sides of a wide room. Rhett saw an insulated bamboo curtain that could have divided the beds, creating private rooms, but it was pulled back, leaving the space open for them to enjoy together. He opted not to think too much about that, lest he start to laugh.   
Link, of course, beat him to it, but at least his laughter was contained to a few brief tremors of his shoulders and a quick snort through his nose that he convincingly played off as a cough.  
Rhett hardly heard what was said to him throughout the facial. He found his attention drifting off to the other side of the room while his treatments processed, eavesdropping on the questions Link asked about the chemicals soaking into his skin. He couldn’t tell if Link’s curiosity was genuine or intended for his entertainment, but when Link, as sincerely as possible, asked the pH level of three different products, Rhett needed to suck in his cheeks to keep a grin from cracking his mud mask.   
The act continued well into the pedicures that followed, Link overplaying just how good it felt to have his feet in warm water, how good it felt to have someone else push his cuticles. Rhett had rolled his eyes enough to fear ocular strain before a question was finally directed at him and he had to straighten up.   
“How long are you in town?” his technician asked, massaging yet another oil into his calf.  
“Oh, we leave…” Rhett’s tongue froze, suspended in the middle of his mouth, and he had to admit to himself that he was deep in the daze.  
“Thursday,” Link answered, making Rhett laugh. Of course he knew the departure date.   
“Couple more days. That’s nice,” the technician replied quietly. “Lying low tonight, or are we preparing for a big evening?”  
“We seemed to have gotten ourselves invited to the Igl—no, that’s not it,” Rhett failed again, chuckling at himself and deferring to Link for the second time.  
“The Iceberg Lounge?” Link said as a half-question, offering the technicians an out should they not know the place.   
They didn’t need it.   
Both of their expressions changed, eyebrows reaching for hairlines as broad, closed-lip smiles stretched across their mouths. Eye contact was dropped, their focus intensifying, the pressure of their fingers deepening, the calf massages lengthening by minutes. Link turned toward Rhett, and they passed a look of concern between them.  
“Is…is that a nice place? We’ve heard good things…” Link tried.   
“Oh, it’s quite nice. The signature cocktails are unmatched. I’ve heard, at least. I’ve never been,” she answered without looking up.   
“It’s hard to get in?” he pried. Rhett furrowed his brow but didn’t interrupt. He was curious, too.  
“Um, I don’t…maybe a little? I don’t really—it’s just not on my side of town, so, ya know,” she rambled, shaking her head and laughing in a way that shut down any further questions. Link met Rhett’s eyes again and blinked slowly, blankly. Tellingly. Rhett laughed.  
  
An hour later, they were lying on bamboo mats in a dim meditation room, one toward the back, just down from the Oxygen Room, but without any windows, so that the natural light wouldn’t distract those seeking their centers, or their calms, or their whatever-was-promised-by-the-etching-on-the-glass-door. This one had read “Gratitude.” They lay on their backs, puddles of loosened muscle and dewy, over-hydrated skin, staring up at a gold-leaf coffer ceiling that must have been left over from whatever purpose this floor had before it had been turned into a zen-saturated retreat. Incense burned in the corner of the room, as it did just about everywhere, and the smell of it slid like ribbons of silk past their nostrils and into their brains, somehow subverting the headache triggers into which incense usually slammed. Occasionally, the trails of smoke were accompanied by an airy, English voice emanating from speakers hidden behind two potted plants, guiding them through a fifteen-minute meditation for—as advertised— gratitude and positivity. They hadn’t been particularly interested in the meditation part, but no one else was, either, and they liked having another little space all to themselves. There was an inexplicable entertainment in just existing in this glowy spa, so intent on cleansing the spirit that it seemed almost aggressive in its mission. It was something different, quiet and unplanned, unrushed from one activity to the next, unlike the previous few days spent out in the wild, foreign city. It was silly and safe, and perhaps if they’d spent just a little more time in that microcosm of wellness, allowed some truth to float to the surface between them, they may have admitted out loud that the place was actually working on them, that they were actually feeling lighter and more connected at the same time, warm and rather glowy themselves, walking advertisements for the miracles of vitality pools and oxygen rooms.   
But for the moment, they were half-listening to an ethereal voice guide them into peace, half-practicing the instructions, fully interrupting each other every few minutes to discuss the random thoughts bubbling up from their subconsciouses.   
“Allow your eyes to gently close or maintain a soft focus, gazing six to ten feet in front of you,” the voice directed over the hum of Tibetan singing bowls and artificial crickets.  
Link squirmed. “I’m afraid I’ll fall asleep if I close my eyes, and that ceiling is too far away. These are high ceilings. I have to gaze somewhere between my nose and the ceiling, but no closer than six feet. There’s nothing to look at. I just keep focusing on the ceiling.”  
“Say ‘ceiling’ again,” Rhett said.   
“Ce-il-ing,” Link answered, drawing it out. “That’s going to be my mantra. Ce-il-ing.” He went silent, but it didn’t last more than a few seconds. “Where does that come from? Is it sealing us in? Sealing the weather out?”   
“Is it that kind of ‘seal’? Is it from ‘conceal’? Con-ceiling?” Rhett wondered.  
“Like a drop ceiling. You think it’s the top of the room, but it’s not. It’s a con.”  
“Yep.”  
The voice spoke again: “Take a slow, deep breath to bring yourself to the present moment and begin the process of feeling more peaceful and centered. Breathe into the belly so it expands as you breathe in and gets smaller as you breathe out.”  
“I love that. ‘Just begin feeling peaceful,” Rhett mocked. “Like, ‘Just find that peace switch and flip it on.’ Okay, sure, sure.”  
“I think I have a peace switch.”  
“Of course you do. You can fall asleep anywhere. You can just stop caring about things. I think there’s something wrong there.”  
“I’m flipping my peace switch.”  
They went quiet, breathed as they were told. Rhett searched for his switch and came up short, though he didn’t mind. Then he wondered if the fact that he didn’t mind meant that he’d found one, after all.  
The recording talked them through some steps toward mindfulness and calm that they’d heard before, and they played along with little comment. Link’s jaw went slack as he stared into nothingness; his arms fell out to his sides, knuckles of a relaxed hand grazing Rhett’s wrist, both too spaced out to care.  
The voice chimed in with something new: “Think about all the things we have today that make our lives easier and more comfortable than they were for our predecessors, our great-grandparents, and the ancestors that came before. We flip a switch, and light appears. We turn a tap and clean, drinkable water flows. We adjust a thermostat, and a room grows warmer or cooler. We have a roof to keep us dry when it rains, walls to keep out the cold wind, windows to let in the light, screens to keep out insects. We enter a vehicle and it takes us where we want to go. There are machines that store our food at just the right temperature and help us cook it without us having to gather wood. We have public libraries that have thousands of books and recordings, free for anyone to borrow and read.”  
“We have the internet,” Rhett said.  
“We have the internet,” repeated Link, a new mantra.  
“Now,” said the voice after a brief pause of just enough time to allow someone to consider all the advances he takes for granted, “take a moment to reflect on all the people who have worked hard, many without knowing you at all, to make your life easier or more pleasant. Some who plant, grow, and harvest your food. Some who transport that food to market. A team of people who make the roads and railways that make it easier to transport the food.”  
“I think she’s hungry,” Rhett chimed in. Link snickered.   
“Or postal service,” the voice suggested. “Someone who sorts the mail. Others who deliver it.”  
“Sometimes we get food through the mail. It’s all going to go back to food, isn’t it?” Link said. It was Rhett’s turn to snicker.  
She went on. “Those who maintain the servers so you can get and send email and access the Internet.”  
Link: “We have the internet…”  
Rhett: “It’s where we order food.”  
“Those who gather news stories and photos, and those who create the many mechanisms by which the news can reach you.” No joke for this one. Link couldn’t think fast enough for his turn.  
“All those who play sports, create art or music, or plays or poems or films to entertain and uplift you.”  
“That’s us!” Link announced, tapping Rhett’s wrist where his hand had come to rest. “We do that on the internet, where people order food. We do it by eating food.”  
“‘Food’ is a generous label most of the time, but yeah, we made it into this meditation. I think that means we win.”  
“I had not been viewing meditation as a competitive sport,” Link said, mouth still resting in a loose smile.  
“I don’t think you’re doing it right, then.”  
“Now,” the voice interrupted, “consider the people and pets you know who enrich your life, those who smile at you and cheer you on, those family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and peers, those ancestors who worked so you could live well, those friends who support you when you need a shoulder or a hand.”  
Rhett wanted to move his wrist away. The longer he thought in the quiet that had followed, the more Link’s face kept coming up. There were others, family, friends, teachers, fans. But consistently, behind every new visage that had made Rhett feel supported and capable appeared Link’s wide smile, making him feel even more than that: charged, limitless, crackling with potential energy. The contact at his right arm felt dangerous, as if he might give away this step into sentimentality and earn a ribbing he couldn’t fight, but pull the hand away he did not. It must have been the chemicals in the incense.  
“Now, reflect on your own reasons for feeling grateful in this moment.”  
At first, the voice seemed to rescue Rhett, providing him a moment of distraction as he considered the prompt.   
And then Link said, “I’m grateful for this trip, that you convinced me to let you pull me out of my comfort zone for a few days,” and Rhett was plunged deeper into his reverence than he’d been before, so filled with his own gratitude that he could hardly breathe.  
Eventually, he laughed and nudged Link’s knuckles playfully. “Me, too.”   
He hadn’t realized he’d turned his head toward Link until he caught himself several seconds into another stare, full circle from where he’d found himself so early that morning, eyes roving the peaks and planes of Link’s relaxed face. Rhett easily opted not to consider why the recognition of his own gaze made him nervous. A subtle movement caught his eye, and he craned his neck up to see the last step of a figure walking by the beaded doorway. At the thought of being seen watching Link so closely, his cheeks burned furiously as they rounded into a smile that he kept all to himself.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	4. The Iceberg Lounge

Link was running his fingers through his hair one last time when Rhett announced from the adjoining room that he was ready and calling the car. They’d spent the last two hours in their separate rooms, catching quick naps and showering away all the salts and oils that they had carried back with them from the spa. Now cleaned up and buttoning his black collar, Link could see the good those oils had done. His skin was bright and glowing in contrast to his dark shirt. He felt truly clean for the first time since he’d set foot in the city, and it showed. 

Rhett appeared in his bathroom doorway and confirmed as much.

“Look at you,” he said, voice buoyant with amusement and genuine admiration. “A new man!”

“It’s impressive how well this suit fits without having—” Link glanced at Rhett in the mirror, but what he saw hooked his gaze and pushed his eyebrows upward in surprise. 

“I know,” Rhett said, agreeing with the unspoken feedback. “It’s a lot. But I’m leaning in. I like it.”

“It looks good! And you see what I mean about how well they fit without having seen a tailor.”

“Remind me to turn the heat back up when we get back. It was burning up in there when I got out of the shower,” Rhett said. “I was starting to sweat.”

He stepped into the bathroom for one last look at his own full reflection, and Link slipped out behind him, letting his eyes linger on the pattern of Rhett’s suit jacket as it glimmered in the bright light. Thin black diamonds and ovals covered the gray background from blazer to vest to trousers, painting a boldly busy pattern over the otherwise plain gunmetal suit, highlighting the accent of a bright white collar and black tie. Link felt plain in his deep emerald suit, though the dark colors highlighted his newly revived complexion well, and he did appreciate that they’d been given opposite colors for their shirts. 

“Ready,” he said, tightening the thin laces on his shoes. Rhett shut off the light in the bathroom and headed for the door, Link on his heels. 

The drive was quiet, each privately trying to turn up his own energy, shaking off the last traces of a serene daze before they let themselves be seen in public, potentially photographed, given the chance to mingle with the upper echelon seeking entertainment on a weeknight in Gotham. They were let out at the main entrance, a wide lane of concrete covered with a black roof, glittering with clear bulbs that flattered anyone who walked beneath them. Rhett’s eyes scanned the few pedestrians hanging around outside the building, but found no photographers, no one who cared to even ask their names, aside from the tuxedoed doorman to whom Link was already talking.

“N-E-A-L. And McLaughlin. M-C—”

The doorman smirked and held up a hand to stop him. Gesturing toward the leather portfolio cradled in his elbow, he spoke quietly, discretely correcting Link’s error. 

“To protect the privacy of our guests, we use a numeric identification system. If you’re on the list, you should have—”

“Yes,” Rhett interjected, pulling his wallet from his pocket and sliding out the matte black card. He handed it over, and the doorman nodded graciously, quickly retrieving a penlight from his own jacket pocket and shining its blue light over the back of the card. Two hand-written four-digit numbers appeared and were quickly cross-referenced with those in the portfolio. Link’s brow furrowed at both the intricate process and the speed with which it was dispensed. 

“Welcome to the Iceberg Lounge. Your hostess will greet you inside.”

They shot looks at one another and proceeded through the heavy black doors.

A flashbulb flared in their eyes before they could see the photographer, and by the time their sight adjusted to the dim lighting, he was gone, the pair left laughing in his wake. 

“I genuinely don’t know how to feel about that,” Rhett said. 

“So impersonal. This town…” Link pretended to gripe. 

An hour later, they were finishing their third drinks, having had little else to do while listening to a soft jazz ensemble work the small stage at the end of the room. Their table was placed at the front of an elevated section, two steps above what could have been a dance floor, but now seemed to serve as a space for glittering bodies to linger as they waited for their drinks. Their photo had been snapped two or three more times, sans jarring flash and perfectly timed to catch Link laughing or Rhett in a coincidentally couture pose with a crystal tumbler gripped between two long fingers. Their conversation was stilted, made of sparse, quiet exchanges regarding comparisons to events on the west coast, pointing out the shortage of people to approach, the lack of open faces, or even familiar ones, with whom they could strike up an industry-related discussion. The jazz players seemed to be the only other people in the building interested in the entertainment world. The mixture of their vintage, cinematic sound and the bourbon in his bloodstream loosened Rhett’s lips as he finally leaned over the table and looked Link right in the face. 

“This is as far off-brand as we’ve gone, right? What were they thinking, wanting us to be seen here?”

“I didn’t want to be the one to say it,” Link trailed, eyebrow raised in a non-verbal I-told-you-so.

“This looks like a great place to do business, but I’m not sure…I’m not sure we’re in the right business.”

Link laughed and shook his head. “I don’t want to know what that means. Let me go to the bathroom and let’s just get out of here.”

Rhett nodded and turned to face the lower level where bodies had begun to sway together as a red-headed lounge singer took the stage. He didn’t recognize her song, but he could appreciate the desire to move to its bouncy bass-line.

Link could hear it, too, and it buoyed him all the way to the long hallway that housed the restrooms. He let his knuckle slide along the dark marble wall as he walked to the end of the hall, swinging open the restroom’s thick black door, glancing at a burgundy one just beyond the men’s room labeled “Private.” The recessed lighting glinted off the silver letters. 

As he washed his hands, he checked out his reflection. An old habit he had little interest in breaking, he ran his fingertips through his hair to add some volume, but froze when a door slammed against the other side of the wall behind him. He watched the gray tiles in the mirror, half expecting them to crack. His hand lowered to straighten his collar, taking his time as he listened for voices to explain the dramatic entrance someone had just made, seemingly right through that burgundy door. There were no voices, no arguments or directives, and even in the quiet of the empty bathroom, Link could hear nothing else to help him paint a picture of the drama happening on the other side of the wall. He refused to let himself be trapped in the restroom, though, so after another beat, he straightened his shoulders and slipped out the door, listening for voices as he walked away. 

“What are you doing here?” one called out behind him. Link frowned, sure that the question hadn’t been directed at his own back, and kept walking. It called out again, this time with obvious strain.

“Don’t walk away. If you came to say—”

Link turned and looked back at the now-opened door, making eye contact with a shorter man in a black suit, black hair spiked in a confusingly messy and intentional faux-hawk, pointed strands angling over the top of his forehead. His frame was made smaller by his leaning over a desk littered with papers and small boxes that, for a moment, Link thought looked like ammunition containers. 

“Oh,” the man said, seeing Link’s face for the first time. “I thought you were someone else.” 

The intensity of the man’s gaze arrested Link momentarily, his limbs frozen and mouth partially agape as he waited for further instruction. The man squinted at him, then shifted his face into a practiced smile and waved Link on.

“Forgive me. Please, return to your evening. Enjoy yourself,” he said, his voice now disconcertingly smooth. Link smiled at the confusion and raised a hand in a half-wave before turning back toward the lounge.

“I thought someone recognized me,” Link said when he sat back down across from Rhett, finding two fresh drinks on the table, each in a tall, frosty flute with dry ice rolling down to the stem. He pointed at them and cocked his head.

“She brought them before I could stop her,” Rhett explained, shrugging as he raised his own in a wordless toast to the speed of their server. “The house special, courtesy of Roux.”

“Well, I’d hate to be rude,” Link said, testing the concoction and finding it both tart and dangerously satisfying. “Besides,” he said, carefully setting the glass down, “I want you to see this guy. He seemed…strange. He stopped me coming out of the bathroom as if he recognized me, but he didn’t seem…I don’t know. He was agitated.”

“Just standing in the hall?”

Link snorted. “No. He had gone into the office at the end. I don’t know if he kicked the door open or what, but I heard it from in the bathroom. There’s a story there.”

“An employee. Maybe he can get us a discount on the insanely priced appetizers.”

Link raised his glass in agreement and turned his chair to angle toward the hallway, tuning in to his peripheral vision as he and Rhett bounced their knees to the band’s rhythm. The melody ended and the patrons applauded politely as the band announced a short break. As Rhett watched them leave the stage and head for the grand bar, Link kicked his foot under the table. 

“There,” Link murmured, looking pointedly toward the back of the building. The man had emerged from the hall and been met by three imposing figures in dark suits of their own. They each had inches on his height, but their down-turned faces and intent gazes made it clear that he was in control. He was talking through his teeth, lips curled into a forced smile that sent a shiver down Link’s back. He laughed at his own reaction.

“Man, he seems intense, doesn’t he? It kind of weirded me out,” he told Rhett. 

“They seem to be getting an earful. Someone forgot to stock the bar,” Rhett joked. Link pulled out his phone, and while he typed and scrolled away, Rhett noticed the man catch sight of Link, brow twitching with some clear thought that passed as he recognized him from their earlier meeting. 

“He just did it again. Are you sure you don’t know each other?” Rhett asked. 

Link shook his head and slid his phone across the table. “I don’t believe we’ve met.” 

In the search bar, Rhett read Link’s question: _Who runs Iceberg Lounge, Gotham? _A well-polished version of the man smiled up at Rhett, a caption reading, _Oswald Cobblepot, Owner of Gotham__’s Iceberg Lounge_. He locked the phone, shutting down the screen to prevent being spotted researching their host. 

“Oh,” Rhett said. “Okay. So someone really did forget to stock the bar.”

Link’s brow flicked upward. “I definitely just saw a gun under his jacket.” 

“Great. I’m sure it’s for perfectly legitimate business purposes, but, again, not _our _type of business.” Rhett laughed hopelessly and slid his unfinished glass toward the center of the table. “Let’s just get out of here. They got the photos, and they’re not exciting. They won’t run, and we can just chalk this up to a failed experiment. The hors d oeuvres were great. Win some, lose some.”

Link leaned back in his chair, his eyes narrowing in on an idea that Rhett could already tell he didn’t like. He was patient, though, and let Link take another swig of liquid clouds and then speak his mind: “They’ll run them if we’re seen rubbing elbows with the owner of the ‘hottest club in the city.’ According to Roux, at least, who seems to know these things.”

“No. You just said he’s armed, and he looks stressed out, and you may not have noticed, but he’s surrounded by…_bodyguards_,” Rhett hissed as a polite way of avoiding the word ‘thugs.’

“Yeah, but he thought he knew me. I could use that,” Link argued, his smile tellingly crooked, if only by a centimeter. 

“Are you drunk? Are you hearing yourself?”

“And now I know his name, so I can at least get close enough to get a photo. Where’s that sneaky photog?”

“No. No-thank-you on this one. You’re on your own.”

“Bullshit. I’m _working_, and we don’t work solo. I’m embracing your city,” Link said, words coming out slowly and carefully as he pushed himself up. He picked up his glass and took a final sip for courage. “This is my thing. Let me do my thing.”

Link straightened his cuffs and turned on his heels, and Rhett gulped down the entirety of his foggy cocktail in a futile prayer that it could give him the confidence to approach a group of anxious, armed men, even if only doing so from over Link’s shoulder. They crossed the lounge entirely too quickly for his own liking, and before he could come up with a way to introduce himself, Link was already calling out the name he’d seen on his phone.

“Cobblepot, right? Mr. Cobblepot? Oswald?”

Cold blue eyes slid toward Link, and up close, Rhett thought he could see circles forming underneath them. Nothing about the man seemed inviting. 

“I told you—” he began, raising a hand to silently disband the group huddled around him. They stepped back, but not by much. “I thought you were someone else.”

“I know, you thought I looked familiar, and after I had left, I realized I recognized you, too. Maybe I _was_ who you thought, right? Did you go to—” Link replied, diving into a conversation of which Oswald was having none. 

“No,” he interrupted, now holding up his hand to Link. It worked unbelievably well, Rhett thought, as Link stopped immediately. Then again, that may have been the influence of the halfheartedly concealed firearms. “I assure you, sir, you are _not_ who I thought you were. And you do _not_ know me. If you did,” he added, taking a hobbled step toward the pair that caused Rhett to glance down at his feet, “_this_ little exchange,” he spoke quietly, holding Link’s eyes with his own piercing gaze, “would not have happened.”

Rhett stepped back instinctively, his stomach dropping at the implication of just how far over the line Link had gone. Silence hung between them, Link staring down into Oswald’s expectant face, conjuring some witty verbal eject button.

“I’m sorry. I must have seen your face in the paper and thought—” Link tried, causing Oswald to revert to his chilly, artificial smile. 

As Link spoke, Oswald looked away from his face and up at Rhett’s, arching an expectant eyebrow and rolling his eyes when Rhett didn’t step in. He interrupted Link’s stumbling train of thought by placing a hand on his hip, pushing back his black jacket to reveal a shoulder holster resting against his ribs, the grip of a dark pistol catching just enough light to draw their attention to it. “You’re not helping yourself.”

Link’s mouth snapped shut and he nodded, backing up and mouthing another apology before bumping into Rhett, turning back around, and heading toward the bar to pay their tab and make the quickest exit they could. As they strode away, each suppressing nervous smiles and barely believing Link’s boldness, Oswald called out a phrase that each privately hoped had been directed at himself: “Nice suit, by the way.”

Playful bells rang out above a howl of victory and eruption of laughter that shook Rhett from his stupor. He’d followed Link out of the lounge without a word, slid into the hired car, ridden through several blocks of bustling restaurants and pubs, and walked at Link’s heels into the flashing lights and electronic tones of an adult arcade, apparently the first place that came to the driver’s mind when Link had said, “Take us somewhere fun. Noisy and fun.”

They’d maneuvered through the people too engrossed in their drinking and playing to notice the suits that hardly fit in to the casual environment. Somehow, even dressed to the nines, they managed to feel invisible in the chaos of neon and chimes. 

They came across a shuffleboard table and arranged themselves at either end. Link took the first turn, ending it by sliding his fourth puck too hard down the planks, sending it clattering into the basin at Rhett’s hip. The impact jolted Rhett out of his silence and with a puck of his own in hand, he looked straight at Link and said, “We definitely almost got shot, right? That’s what happened there?”

The question made them both shake their heads and laugh. 

“I didn’t see anyone reaching for anything,” Link finally answered, gesturing for Rhett to take his turn. He did so, pushing a blue puck too lightly for it to even end up in scoring range. 

A waitress decked out in glowing jewelry approached Link’s side, and before Rhett could decline any more drinks, a bucket of beers had been ordered and the waitress had sauntered away.

Upon catching Rhett’s disapproving expression, Link pointed a finger at him and added, “That doesn’t mean I want to remember that encounter.”

Rhett shook his head and did not hesitate when the metal bucket was delivered to the table nearest their game. 

Hours passed much more easily in the arcade, and with their hands and brains occupied with competition, their tension melted into an anxious euphoria. They ricocheted from basketball free throw galleys to skee-ball lanes, and with every body they grazed or bumped, panic flooded their systems, washed away by a stranger’s apologetic smile or carefree giggle until the routine itself became a joke: bump into someone, feign fear, laugh it off. 

Scarves of yellow tickets draped around their necks as they finished their last beer, and Link let the bucket’s handle slide off his wrist until the bucket clanged down onto the end of the metal-topped bar. Rhett slung his suit jacket over his shoulder, white sleeves half-glowing under a distant black light. Link stared at the fabric a moment as a realization seemed to sweep over him, words forming on his lips as he leaned against the bar. Rhett leaned forward to hear them.

“He’s going to be so disappointed in us!” Link half-yelled over the din of the arcade. At some point in the past hour, speakers in the ceiling had started blasting top forty hits. 

Rhett frowned, processing the words a moment before they made any sense. “Oh, Roux,” he groaned. 

“After he worked so hard to get us in! We’ll be such an embarrassment!”

Rhett laughed. “I don’t think anyone heard what was said. Maybe it looked how you wanted it to. Like you were old friends!”

Link’s brows lifted. “Maybe it looked like _we_ were giving _him_ the business!” 

They cracked up at the suggestion, each recalling how quickly they had left the lounge after their brief conversation with Cobblepot, each recognizing the unlikelihood that any bystanders would draw such a conclusion.

They had plenty to celebrate, but they settled on celebrating their survival. Their brush with danger added a tinge of desperation to their pursuit of lightheartedness. They wandered, played, danced like fools for no one’s amusement but their own. They tossed back shots that glowed under black lights, counted flakes of gold left on their tongues after glitter bombs, joined in on a birthday toast they’d overheard on their walk to the bathroom.

After Rhett had zipped his fly, he meandered over to the row of sinks and found Link staring at himself in the mirror, eyes working hard to stay focused on his own face.

“What are you lookin’ for?” Rhett asked, causing Link to smile fully.

“Who knows? Let you know when I find it.” 

Rhett laughed at the nonsense answer and shook the water off his hands. He reached for a paper towel and glanced back at Link, whose eyes had narrowed as they looked over the top of his glasses. 

“I could be intimidating, couldn’t I? I could be scary like that guy.”

“Do you want to be?” Rhett asked. 

Link slid his glasses up the bridge of his nose and shrugged. “It’s easier to be friendly. I would just rather be nice. Wouldn’t you think?”

“He was nice enough. I mean, it was nice that he didn’t have you jumped for approaching him,” Rhett countered. They snickered again and made their way to the door, letting the blaring music and colored lights envelop them again, the over-stimulation grinding the final edge from their nerves so that by the time they fell into the back of their private black SUV, they were bouncing between fits of loopy giggles and jokes at which no one else would have laughed. They’d settled on downplaying their close call, labeling it one of many social misadventures. 

“How did we get so far away from the hotel? Did we leave the state?” Link asked, words tripping unsteadily from his lips as his head bobbed side to side on their SUV’s backrest.

“I’m not sure. I can’t think about anything but room service. I’m starving,” Rhett said, face expressionless, as if he was truly on the brink of death. “I don’t have to order from the room’s phone, right? I can order from here. It’ll be ready when we get—”

Link rolled his head to the right and let it fall appreciatively on Rhett’s shoulder. His arms moved of their own accord and wrapped around Rhett’s bicep, hands coming to curl under his own chin. “That’s the best idea you’ve ever had. You’re the smartest person I know.”

Rhett laughed at the sudden display of admiration and pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket. He called the hotel and placed an order that, with the inclusion of all of Link’s murmured cravings, bordered on the obscene in its indulgence. With most of his requests fulfilled, Link allowed his eyes to close and dozed on Rhett’s arm, telling him more than once that the fabric of his jacket was “stiff, but cool to the touch,” and “a perfectly refreshing temperature.”

With Link gone quiet, Rhett kept his phone in his hand, pulled up his own search bar, and after confirming that Link’s eyes were, in fact, closed, typed in _Oswald Cobblepot_.

By the time they reached the hotel, Rhett’s appetite had subsided, quelled by the headlines that had piled up in his brain. _Cobblepot wins Mayoral Campaign. Cobblepot presumed dead. Oswald __“Penguin” Cobblepot opens new nightclub downtown. Penguin committed after child murder. Riddler helps Penguin escape Arkham Asylum! _The snapshots of stories rattled around in him even as they snickered at their stumbling through their hotel’s lobby, even as Link closed one eye to focus on the elevator buttons, pressed the one for their floor and the buttons on either side of it, “just to be safe,” even as they thanked their elevator and went careening out into their hallway, each racing for his own key, digging through pockets for his wallet. Link won, so they entered through his room, and even upon noticing the faint smell of his aftershave still lingering at the door to his bathroom, Rhett felt his information fighting for access to his tongue. It wanted to be shared; it wanted Link to know who he’d been messing with. It wanted to chastise him, to condemn his foolishness. And part of it wanted to celebrate their survival even harder.

“What’s that look?”

Once more, Rhett snapped out of his daze at Link’s question.

“Hmm? Nothing. No look. Just…we did actually place that order, right?”

Link nodded and started to peel off his jacket. “New plan,” he started as Rhett crossed into his own room, dropping onto the bed and staring at the slightly-spinning ceiling. “Tomorrow, we call Roux, we thank him for his help, we sleep late, we eat breakfast or lunch or whatever, and then we sleep some more, and then we go out for a nice dinner, and then we have an early bedtime. Hangover day. It’s the responsible thing to do,” Link rambled, stopping only to cheer for the knock on Rhett’s door. 

“Or we could just not have a plan. We could turn off our phones and just follow our hearts,” Rhett said, rolling off the bed to answer the door, pulling the full cart of side dishes into his room just as Link emerged in sweat pants and a Wayne Plaza sweatshirt he’d picked up the day before. 

“Our hungry, hungry hearts,” Link agreed, picking up a cup of fries and cradling them in his elbow as he set to work on a dish of ice cream. He stood in the middle of the room, so focused on his mid-night binge that he couldn’t be bothered to sit. He chewed several fries with his eyes closed in a slightly-swaying reverie, and the sight of it made Rhett laugh hard enough to forget the concerns that had weighed on him moments before. How, he wondered, could he ever think he _wouldn__’t_ be hungry after a night like this?

The TV flickered on and they resumed their positions from the night before, Link lying at the foot of the bed, Rhett leaning against the headboard. Ten minutes into their lazing, Link rolled onto his side and stared at Rhett. He cocked his head.

“I’ve been trying to cover up with the extra blanket down here. It’s freezing in here.”

“I forgot to turn the heat back up. Shit. Let’s go to your room.”

Link crinkled his nose and narrowed his eyes. “I don’t want food all over my room.”

“I don’t remember volunteering my room to be the garbage can, either,” Rhett protested. It didn’t matter. Link was already shimmying up the bed, recklessly digging his legs under the comforter, yanking the blankets up around his chest. He hushed Rhett with a long _shh_, and settled in. 

“Can you hand me that water bottle?” he asked, sending Rhett balking at his boldness, but obliging anyway. 

The night wound down like this, Rhett on top of the bed, still in his suit, eyes glued to the television in lieu of watching Link fall asleep in his bed. Half an hour passed like this until he noticed that Link’s quips had grown few and far between. He’d stopped laughing at the ridiculous 80’s-themed commercial for a local nightclub that had cracked them up each time they’d seen it the last night. And with a quick glance over his shoulder, Rhett confirmed his suspicions: Link had passed out, head fallen awkwardly onto his own shoulder as he’d stayed propped up on his newly claimed pillows. Rhett shook his head and slipped off the bed, padded to the bathroom, undressed to his underwear and undershirt and brushed his teeth. He’d meant to make a decision in there, but opted to inspect his own hazy reflection instead, trying to predict just how awful he would feel in the morning. By the time he’d returned to the room and shut off the television, he’d forgotten altogether that he’d considered switching rooms, leaving Link to sleep in his bed while he slept in Link’s, each having his own space.

The thought was miles away when he crawled back into his bed, bare legs brushing against Link’s flannel pants. The motion stirred Link just enough to make him recognize his own discomfort, and he mirrored Rhett’s movement, lying flat on his pillow. A second later, though, he propped himself up on his elbow, catching Rhett before he could switch off the bedside lamp.

Rhett held the stare, looked back into Link’s cloudy gaze with an intensity that he didn’t recognize. It felt like anticipation. 

And then just as quickly as he’d popped up, Link exhaled a voiceless laugh and dropped back onto the pillow, eyes closing in a heavy, drunken sleep. 

Rhett turned off the light, threw a heavy blackness over the room, and closed his eyes tightly, willing himself to sleep for thirty-six hours straight so that they could simply wake up as themselves again and leave this city behind.

He did not dream in the hours that passed, but with the blackout curtains drawn, he slept so heavily through the morning hours that he did not hear the frantic buzzing of his phone, still tucked in the pocket of his jacket on the bathroom floor, its screen lighting up every other minute for half an hour straight, always with the same single name: Roux.


	5. Day Zero

Link had been taking a more proactive approach to his diet and exercise in the past few years, cutting down on sugar-loaded breakfasts and ramping up his fitness regiment, ever keeping his body guessing and reaping no small rewards for his effort. As a result, he rarely had the physical complaints that tended to come with middle age. He was energetic, flexible, and could bounce back from just about anything with impressive speed. But his body did tend to rebel against one substance, taking its sweet time in its recovery when processing an overindulgence of alcohol.

It dried him out, rusted his joints and fogged his brain, and the old college cures of Gatorade and greasy food only seemed to make him feel worse. Instead, he slept until his body demanded attention via hydration, caloric intake, or, most likely, a trip to the bathroom.

Noon had come and gone by the time he’d made his first closed-eyed journey, relying solely on his sense of touch to guide him through the experience. He managed to wash his hands and find a water glass on the counter by feeling around, and he gulped down two cups before heading back out into the room. On his way out, he tripped over Rhett’s clothes, stumbling into the door jamb and pausing to untangle the long arms of the jacket from his toes. As he did so, the phone inside the jacket buzzed with an incoming message, but Link couldn’t bring himself to risk fully waking up in order to check it out. Instead, he fished around for the device and brought it with him. As he passed the door to the hallway, he thought he heard running feet pound the carpet outside and shook his head at the inconsiderate youth that must be bounding across their floor.

Without a word, he felt his way back to the bed and set the phone on Rhett’s nightstand, whispering a notice of delivery to deaf ears before setting off for his own side of the bed. It would not have been much harder to navigate his way back to his own room, but he talked himself out of it by recalling how warm the sheets had felt when he’d left them, the perfect contrast against the chilly air that neither of them had bothered to correct the night before. He climbed back into the cocoon of his own body heat and pulled the covers up to his neck. He fought for sleep against a dull ache in his stomach, but he was unyielding and willing to do whatever it took to avoid a waking hangover. On this day, that meant curling into a ball to cradle his own stomach and consequently pressing his forehead against Rhett’s back. 

Rhett was a lighter sleeper, though, and noticed the intrusion immediately. 

He let it go, and listened to the pattern of Link’s slow breathing to lull himself back to sleep.

It was a scene of peace, an acceptance of each other’s weakened states, a mutual attempt to undo the damage all their fun had done twelve hours before. And it was interrupted by another buzz of Rhett’s phone.

He stirred just a little, so Link knew he was awake and didn’t feel guilty for breaking their silence. “Please do something about that.”

“Mmm.”

But he didn’t. He let it go, only to receive another message as soon as Link had started to slip back under. This earned Rhett a jab in the ribs.

“Turn it off.”

Of course, Rhett could have suggested that Link leave his room, but this petulant retort didn’t feel all that inviting. So he groaned and stretched his arm out of the covers for the phone. He’d have disrupted Link’s careful arrangement of blankets had Link not thought to hold tightly to them with a hand tucked under his chin.

And then it didn’t matter. Any hope Link had had of sleeping off their two-man party was lost to the blue light of Rhett’s touch screen.

“Oh, shit,” Rhett muttered, rubbing his face as he tried to process what he was seeing. 

“What time is it?” Link croaked.

“I don’t—it’s two-thirty. I have a ton of missed calls from Roux. Where’s your phone?”

“Other room.”

“Go check it. Something’s going on.”

“No.”

“I’m serious. Get up.”

Link pried his eyes open and groggily pushed himself out of bed as Rhett called his voicemail. He shuffled along the carpet toward the connecting door, and by the time he’d reached his own room, he’d woken up enough to face the light of day. He grabbed his phone from the nightstand and crossed to the window, pulling back the heavy curtain to let the light in. His phone clattered against the windowsill on its way to the floor.

“Oh my god,” said his mouth as his brain reeled at the sight of the streets. “Rhett? Look outside.”

He listened for the sound of Rhett’s curtains sliding along their metal rods and stared at the streets below. Cars were jammed bumper to bumper, filling every inch of asphalt regardless of painted lines and traffic signals. Lights were flashing and arms were flailing out of windows as drivers and passengers communicated via terse and frantic gestures. The sidewalks were a steady stream of pedestrians, most carrying backpacks or suitcases, several jogging empty-handed, all moving in the same direction, away from the hotel. 

Link flinched when Rhett appeared at his side. He had been so focused on the scene below that he hadn’t heard him coming. Rhett picked up Link’s phone and handed it over to him. He called his own voicemail on speaker phone. 

“Link, this is Roux. I’ve been trying to call Rhett, and I can’t get through. I hope this means you’ve evacuated already, but if not, you’re closest to the Brown bridge—” The message cut off, and Link looked to Rhett, who was reading through a string of text messages.

“‘Reception is already spotty. Calls are getting dropped. If Brown Bridge is packed, try for the Peterson Tubes.’ What the hell…?” 

As Link’s brain spun into overdrive, Rhett trotted to the TV and turned it on. A red crawler rolling over the lower third of an emergency newscast filled them in: _BOMB THREAT AS GOTHAM EVACUATES_. “After the mayor’s evacuation orders, the new Trigate Bridge is absolute bedlam. Drivers are urged to obey all traffic laws as they make their way out of the city. Move in a quick and orderly fashion. We’re seeing the same level of panic on every bridge and tunnel out of the city, and we just want to remind you that recklessness will only slow down everyone’s safe exit. Please look out for your neighbors as you make your way out of the city. Again, Gotham City is under a mandatory evacuation after a domestic terrorist detonated a bomb inside the Gotham Clock Tower and has threatened to detonate an unknown number of similar devices around the city later today…”

“I don’t understand how…why did no one tell us? Why is no one banging on doors?” Link said, glancing back out the window at the chaos in the streets.

“The staff must be gone. If they were the first to know, they may have all gone home to pack bags and get out. I don’t…we need to—” Rhett started and stopped his thought a couple times before finally looking at Link’s face and taking a deep breath to slow his spiral into hyperventilation. “I’ll try to call Roux. Pack your backpack. We have to go.”

Link leapt into action, racing to the dresser to grab what clothes he could fit in his backpack, dressing himself in the process. His laptop slid against the side of the pack and with the addition of his toiletry bag from the bathroom, he was ready to go. He reentered Rhett’s room to find him zipping up his own bag, throwing it over his shoulders and heading for the door, each leaving entire suitcases worth of belongings behind.

Their hallway was empty, eerily quiet compared to what they had seen on the streets. They jogged down the hallway, Link zipping up his green jacket on the way. Rhett crushed the elevator’s call button at least five times, only exhaling once the doors chimed open. 

The car was empty, its smooth jazz music playing for no one. Despite his urgency in calling the elevator, Rhett hesitated before pressing the lobby’s button. 

“It’s going to be insane out there,” he said. Link nodded and pressed the button for him. The doors closed.

“We stick together. We’ll hold on to each other’s packs if necessary. There’s no way we can get a car,” Link said, voice level as he worked through their exit in his head. “We’ll follow the foot traffic to the Brown Bridge, like Roux said.”

“An entire building blew up,” Rhett murmured. Link stared at the metal doors and nodded. 

“If it happens again, we won’t be here to see it. We’re getting out, getting to the airport, and going home.”

The doors opened, and the pair stepped out into the lobby. They were quiet as they made their way to the main entrance, each scanning the desks and doorways for employees, other guests, any signs of life. Everything was abandoned.

Then the fire alarm sounded, bells ringing out a warning that they could have used hours ago.

“Guess someone’s still in the building,” Link shouted over the alarm. Rhett raised his brows and faced the door, but Link was the first to walk through it. He pushed his way onto the sidewalk, quickly falling in line with the westward scurrying pedestrians. 

At the end of the first block, they learned the pattern of dodging slow-moving but unstopping cars, the news anchor’s reminders to obey all traffic laws clearly fallen on ears deafened by panic. Drivers lay on their horns to no effect other than adding discordant wails to a chaotic score. 

Their long legs carried them a little faster than the average pedestrian, so they rarely found themselves caught in the mobs that seemed to slow down the flow at crosswalks. They were already several blocks from their hotel when a familiar voice called out their names from the middle of the street. 

Link spotted him first, a short torso in a red coat waving at them from a black sedan.

“Holy shit! There he is!” Link blurted out, almost laughing at his surprise. Rhett caught his breath and eyed the cars creeping by. 

“We can get to him. Just keep pace with the traffic,” he commanded, taking hold of Link’s bag and following his winding route through the street, a taxi nearly clipping his leg just as they reached Roux’s car. Link yanked open the back door and slid in, Rhett hot on his heels.

“I can’t believe I saw you,” Roux said, all pretense and playfulness dropped from his voice. He was a different person from who they’d toured the city with two days ago, made more real by his own fear. “I tried getting a hold of you! Where were your phones?” he asked, and Link thought he heard a thread of anger in the question. It may have been warranted, he thought, so he shook his head solemnly.

“They were silenced. We were both asleep. Nobody in the hotel—”

“That’s no surprise. We’re a bit ‘every man for himself’ around here,” Roux replied before Link needed to finish the thought. “You’re safe, now, though. I know it feels slower on the street, but we _are_ moving, and once we get across the bridge, I’ll be able to drive much faster.”

The car fell quiet, and from the backseat, the pair heard the radio for the first time, its volume low as the same evacuation message played on a loop. It repeated several times as the car inched forward, commuters all avoiding eye contact as they fought the urge to rush the intersections, cut each other off, or block each other out in the name of self-preservation. Link shivered, then felt Rhett shift in his seat so that their knees barely touched. He could feel the tension radiating off of Rhett, but the contact still soothed him just a little. They rode in an anxious silence for over half an hour, Rhett glimpsing over Roux’s shoulder every so often to check the fuel gauge.

Long after they had heard the emergency recording enough times to commit it to memory, Link finally spoke over it. 

“How long have you been on the road?”

Rhett shot a pointed look in his direction, and Link knew immediately how transparent the question was. He was itching to rejoin the pedestrians, growing convinced with each passing minute that they were ultimately making faster progress than the vehicles. 

Roux shook his head. “I live on the east side, so it’s been a long trip. I left about two and a half hours ago. At this pace, I think another hour should get us—”

But before he could finish, the sound of crunching metal drown him out. They all sat up in fresh alarm, heads whipping around for the source of the sound, and just before Link’s head hit the back of the passenger’s seat headrest, Rhett’s arm tried to shoot out across his chest to hold him back. 

He couldn’t open his eyes at first. The impact had shocked his system, and he had to assess the damage to his own body before he could look around him. His head hurt, as he knew it would the instant he heard the crunch of Roux’s back bumper, but it was a dull, harmless-seeming pain. An ache that felt more like a murmured complaint than a siren of critical injury. His neck had stiffened up immediately, but he could roll his head back and forth. His left wrist ached a bit from trying to catch himself on the back of the seat, but he assessed it as a minor sprain at worst. All systems go.

Link finally pried open his eyes and found his glasses miraculously undamaged in his lap. He was just sliding them on when Rhett forced his own door open and stumbled out into the street. He looked to the driver’s seat and found that Roux was already gone, so Link slid over to Rhett’s open door and carefully climbed out, too. 

“What the hell was that?” Link asked, following Rhett’s gaze to the mess that had started four cars behind them: an oversize pickup truck, modified with massive tires and a steel cattle catcher had plowed into the line of cars from the last intersection and rammed its way through a third of a block’s worth of vehicles until it came to a violent stop not far behind them. As the events began to register in the minds of the drivers of the wrecked cars, they threw themselves out into the streets and sidewalks and began running, most abandoning their belongings without looking back.

But Rhett was looking back, transfixed by the wreckage piled up behind them. His head whipped side to side as the sound of motorcycles approached from all sides of the destruction, roaring engines carrying the bikes through traffic as they slid in between stopped cars. It was then that Link noticed Roux leaning against the car as he cursed. 

“What is going on?” Link asked. 

Roux shook his head. “The Street Demonz. Criminals taking advantage of desperate people.”

“Oh, god,” Rhett groaned. “We don’t have time for this. Let’s get out of here.”

Link nodded and turned in the direction of the bridge, taking a deep breath to ready himself. “Okay. Let’s go. Roux, let’s go.” 

They took off on foot, weaving between cars as they worked their way to a sidewalk that promised to be more easily navigable. They passed more runners, some slowing to watch the gang approach, their senses of self-preservation seemingly compromised. The trio made it all the way to the next intersection before a pair of motorcycles cut them off in the street, their riders offering wicked smiles as greetings. They were an interesting pair, one riding shirtless, covered in tattoos from face to fingers, and the other bundled in a thick leather jacket and full-face helmet with a raised visor.

“Where’s everyone off to?” the tattooed man shouted. “Some kinda party we weren’t invited to?”

“There are city-wide bomb threats,” Roux answered, voice unsteady but loud. “Everyone is just trying to get out. Shouldn’t you be doing the same? Get to the bridges,” he advised, trying to talk sense into the pair in order to save his own skin. “We don’t want any trouble. We all just want to get out alive.”

From the corner of his eye, Link caught Rhett just slightly shaking his head, visibly disagreeing with Roux’s strategy. 

“Oh-ho! Just a couple-a-good neighbors here, huh? Lookin’ out for your fellow man?” the tattooed man responded with a chuckle. “I gotta tell ya, boys, I think we’re stayin’ put. Someone’s gonna have to put this place back together if it all gets blown to shit, right? I appreciate your concern, though. Tell ya what, if you wanna help out so much, how ‘bout you provide some resources for our rebuilding efforts? Empty those pockets and hand over the bags.”

The seconds passed slowly as Link watched Roux freeze in front of him. The bikers tilted their heads expectantly, starting to reach for the pistols in their waistbands. Rhett started to shrug off his backpack, the movement catching Link’s eye, causing him to notice the tremble of Rhett’s hands. They were in rough shape, bodies still fighting hangovers, hungry and dehydrated, adrenaline causing them to burn too quickly through what energy they had. And now this. It should have frightened Link into acting reasonably, cutting ties with the unnecessary material belongings hanging on his body, allowing his load to be lightened so that he could move even more quickly. It should have chilled him into compliance. It should have caused him to do as he was told in the name of survival.

It did something else.

“Are you kidding me?” he barked. Roux turned to look at him, shaking his head sharply, but Link didn’t bother to meet his gaze. He took a step toward the bikers. “You’re kidding me, right? You’re hustling people on the street for their wallets and backpacks while ignoring the buildings that are being left vacant all around you? What’s the point of trying to scare people who won’t even be here for you to collect on later? If you want money, go after the registers in these shops! Break in and go crazy. It’ll take the cops an hour to get to you, anyway. Go crazy!” he ordered, gesturing flippantly toward the buildings around them. When nobody moved, he rolled his eyes. “Are you serious?! Tell me you are not _this_ bad at your jobs.” He gestured again at the buildings, and this time, their eyes followed, considering his proposal. 

“Why not both?” asked the man in the leather jacket. Before his partner could speak, Link broke in again.

“You’d rather carry my underwear on your back than load up your own bag of cash? There’s a drugstore right there, with tote bags in the window.”

“Let’s just shoot ‘em,” the tattooed man said with resignation. 

“No!” Roux protested, one arm in the air as the other dug out his wallet and tossed it on the ground between him and the bikes. 

“You won’t be the only one looting these stores. You might need those bullets. Don’t waste them on three unarmed nobodies,” Link warned, vaguely aware of Rhett’s eyes locked onto the back of his head.

A long silence passed between them, Link standing his ground with expectant eyebrows raised. The tattooed man sighed and shook his head, revving his engine and taking off for a shop on the opposite side of the street. His partner started to do the same, lowering his visor and shaking his head. Roux exhaled and stepped forward, bending to pick up his wallet. 

The sound of the gunshot was so loud that Link was momentarily dazed by it, shocked by the assault on his eardrums. The biker raised his visor again, smoking gun glittering in the early evening light.

“No take-backs,” he said, rolling up to the wallet and stooping to pick it out of Roux’s loosened fingers before taking off after his partner. 

Whatever force had possessed Link to stand up to the bikers was exorcised by the sight of Roux bleeding out on the sidewalk. Rhett was kneeling next to him, applying pressure to the wound in his chest, talking to him, telling him to stay awake, telling him that he would be alright. Link could barely hear him, the sound of his voice far away, distorted as if under water. From what he could tell without looking directly at him, Roux seemed to be watching the sky, apologizing, for what Link did not know. Rhett shouted at Link, ordered him to call an ambulance, but lost heart when he remembered the state of the city around them. 

Link numbly pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed 9-1-1, and held it face-up in his palm, hearing the robotic tones signaling a failure to connect. His eyes were fixed on a crack in the concrete just past Roux’s head; he knew that if he looked right at him, he’d risk passing out or vomiting, and neither seemed safe now. 

This went on for a full hour, Link repeating his useless calls while Rhett held a t-shirt from his backpack against Roux’s chest. It was a hopeless endeavor, and they all seemed to sense it. Link knew what was coming, knew what it would take for he and Rhett to start moving again, and as soon as he dared to wish for it, his stomach churned in disgust. It was an agonizing wait, first spent in begging those who rushed by them for help, then spent accepting the reality that nobody would stop for a stranger with so little safe time left in the evacuation. 

And then, not long after the sun had fully set, it was quiet, relatively. Both men on the ground stopped talking, stopped gasping and exerting themselves and working so hard. One went still and the other shook his head, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, then wiped his face with his shirt to remove the accidental smear of blood.

“We have to go,” Link said, hating himself for doing so. 

Rhett stood and choked out a sob of exhaustion, shaking his head. “We can’t just leave him here.”

Link nodded, wanting to agree, but his eyes followed the passersby who were giving them a wide berth. They glanced at the man on the ground, but they kept moving. And he knew they needed to do the same.

Rhett looked around, searched for some answer in the concrete and asphalt surrounding them, but came up with nothing better than pulling Roux away from the street and laying him in the doorway to a real estate office to keep him out of the footpath. Link heard him quietly apologize as he straightened Roux’s jacket, smoothing out what he could, cleaning a streak of blood from Roux’s cheek before wiping his own face one more time and taking off again. 

They walked in silence for another block, and Link could feel the words forming between them. Their pace was frantic, their breath too hurried to allow for speech, but he knew that as soon as they slowed, he was in for something awful. It was brewing behind Rhett’s gritted teeth. 

In Link’s head, Roux’s voice was echoing on repeat, warning them not to take to the streets at night. 

And then they turned a corner, and the Brown Bridge came into view, jammed with unmoving cars and blocked by police vehicles. 

“What the hell?” Rhett muttered, stopping to catch his breath, trying for a second time that day to make sense of what he was seeing. “Are they keeping people off the bridge? How the hell are we supposed to get—”

“They’re pulling people off of it,” Link said, the sound of his own voice sending a wave of nausea through him.

“No. No, no.” Rhett whispered, backing up, his hand coming up blindly against Link’s chest, guiding him backward, too. 

Link attributed this to some premonition, some instinct that never seemed to kick in for both of them at the same time, ever leaving one to catch up to the other. This time, he was left watching Rhett drop to his knees, so far from where they’d started their escape, so close to their promised safety when, one after another, bombs detonated on both ends of all the bridges connecting Gotham to the mainland, dropping them into the river, fulfilling some wicked promise of turning the city into a dark island, stranding all who were left behind.


	6. From the Brink

The red velvet-wrapped chairs of the hotel cradled them softly, two somber last bastions keeping worn bodies off the floor. Midnight had come and gone; the city had fallen cryptically quiet. It did not necessarily feel safe to sit exposed in the lit, empty lounge, but upon their defeated re-entry, Rhett seemed to hit a wall. He collapsed in a chair and buried his face in his hands. Link dropped into the seat opposite him and draped his legs over one arm, elevating them in order to stretch and dissipate the tingle of fatigue in his muscles. 

They’d watched the mass of officers hurl themselves into action as the bridges blew, trying to recover those who had not heeded their warnings to stay back, trying to keep order in the midst of panic. Their voices had dried up in their throats in watching screaming evacuees stare down into the water as cars sank under the crush of iron girders, steel beams, and twisted cables, and when finally a GCPD officer announced over a megaphone that everyone needed to return to their homes and keep their emergency radios charged, Rhett turned away from the flashing lights and started walking. Link had known without asking where he was headed; they’d had only one option. 

They walked on the opposite side of the street from where Roux had fallen, and neither looked in his direction to see what, if anything, had become of him. Link just kept up and waited for Rhett to speak first. The words didn’t come until they were both fully hollowed out by the day, arms and legs jutting at odd angles as their skeletons tried to conform to the hotel lobby’s chairs.

“Did you have to do it?” Rhett croaked, clearing his throat upon realizing how broken it sounded. Link didn’t answer, so he decided to clarify. “Did you have to mouth off to the…to them?”

He finally looked over at Link, making eye contact for the first time in hours, despite their continuous proximity. Link took off his glasses and ran a hand over his face.

“I don’t know. What they were doing—”

“They just wanted our shit. We could’ve given them our bags. They wouldn’t have…we’d have been fine.”

Rhett’s red-rimmed eyes looked up to the high ceiling, blinked and blinked from drying out and burning, threatening to unleash something powerful if he dared to let down his guard.

“You don’t know that,” Link replied without looking away. “You don’t know what they’d have done had they not been...redirected.”

The ceiling offered little in the way of distraction; in its light gray plaster Rhett could only see the unsettling shade Roux’s face had turned as he’d succumbed to the gunshot. The color had drained out of his body and onto Rhett’s hands, soaking into him, turning him into this new version of himself, a man who knew the feeling of watching someone die in his arms. The knowledge came with a sickening sort of gratitude for all that had _not_ come to pass, and he could only sit silent for another tense minute before it came rushing out of his mouth, erupting with the force of a sob that doubled him over: “It could have been you.”

By Rhett’s next breath, Link had sat at his knees, weaving his hands under Rhett’s arms, placing one on each side of his head, lifting it just enough to press their foreheads together. Shame and exhaustion kept Rhett from opening his eyes, but Link didn’t seem to mind. He held their heads together like this for a long deep inhalation that, once Rhett mimicked, managed to calm them both down. 

“It could have been _all_ of us,” Link said with what Rhett thought was a surprisingly level voice. “We’re lucky to be alive. It’s up to us to stay that way.”

Rhett nodded, rolling their foreheads together, and Link stayed right there with him, fully invading his space in order to keep him together. 

“Okay,” he eventually whispered, sniffing and resetting his shoulders. Link pulled back, giving him some room, but didn’t stand up. “I have to sleep. I’m losing it.”

Link nodded and pushed himself up. “Good idea. One quick pit-stop.”

They hadn’t had to wander the sub-level long before coming to the large metal doors of the hotel’s kitchen. Like everything they’d seen of the building so far, it had been abandoned mid-shift. Bags of frozen vegetables had thawed on the counters; a half-dozen slices of thick wheat bread stood patiently in the commercial toaster. Link had plucked four of them out and scrounged the massive pantry for peanut butter while Rhett grabbed a metal basket of fruit and sat on the floor, devouring most of a green apple before Link could drop next to him and pass him a sandwich. Before long, they’d dug around the kitchen some more, finding potato chips and granola, eating both by the fistful as their appetites finally reared their vicious heads.

“Is this what comfort eating looks like?” Rhett finally asked, looking around at the discarded apple cores, chip bag, granola packages. Link nodded deeply and plunged a finger into the industrial-sized jar of peanut butter in his lap, closing his eyes as he scooped it into his mouth.

Rhett surveyed the higher shelves of the pantry. “We should bring some upstairs. I didn’t see a TV down here, and I want to keep an eye on the news.” 

His words seemed to jog his own memory, and he leaned to the side to pull his phone from his pocket, unlocking its screen only to find it still lacking service. He’d expected Link to do the same, but Link opted instead to indulge in another scoop of peanut butter, sighing as he screwed the lid back on. It didn’t matter, Rhett figured. There would likely be no communication with the mainland for some time.

The phone lay as dead weight in his palm while they sat quietly for a few minutes longer, finding solace in the contact that their knees had made as their legs had sprawled wearily on the cold tile floor. Rhett drew a deep breath, filling his lungs completely for what felt like the first time all day, and when he let it out, Link shivered. Rhett looked at him, about to suggest that they leave, and found him already sleeping, head fallen back against the steel shelf, lips parted just enough to allow Rhett to smell the peanut butter still on his breath. A quick swipe across the phone’s screen opened the camera, and in this quiet moment at the center of such desperation, Rhett was relieved to find that his phone was not so useless after all.

* * *

The Narrows had never seemed particularly welcoming to Oswald Cobblepot, and the desperate eyes that occasionally peered at him through dirty windows made it less so. He did not want to be watched in this state, taking a few hours from the establishment of his new headquarters to follow up on a rumor that had made its way to City Hall: earlier that day, apparently, someone who resembled Edward Nygma had been seen dragging someone who resembled James Gordon into the defunct Riddle Factory. 

Oswald had heard about the torture devices Ed had installed in his building, each contributing a wickedly entertaining thrill to his short-lived game show, but the thought of using those gimmicks to maim or, more likely, kill Gordon simply did not sit well with him. There was no question that the captain’s life was in jeopardy: Ed had not proven to be the type to leave his lovers’ exes in peace. 

The thought of Lee Thompkins being one of those lovers made Oswald roll his eyes. It was perverse. Illogical. And exactly the insane sort of thing that Nygma would do. 

So, unfortunately, was killing James Gordon.

Thus, Oswald found himself shoving open a heavy door with his shoulder and stumbling into the Riddle Factory. In the darkened showroom, still converted into an empty theater, he held his breath and listened, trying to detect movement, voices, any signs of life. When he found nothing in the lower level, he felt his way to the back staircase and slowly climbed to the loft, fingers gripping the corroding handrail tightly enough that his palm was flaked with rust when he reached the top. 

The loft was much brighter than the main level, as the afternoon sun was coming in through its massive industrial windows, back-lighting a five-foot tall question mark that Oswald only noticed after looking past the massive hydraulic press situated near the center of the room. 

He crossed toward the windows, noting the absence of blood on the table and floor, but also noting that the power light on the controller was still illuminated. His jaw clenched and relaxed over and over as he considered what might have happened here. 

It wasn’t that he minded Ed embracing the violent streak he’d suppressed for so long. For a while, it had almost made him proud. For a while, Ed had flourished as a man free from the confines of a law-abiding society, a man taking and doing whatever his impulses demanded. He had been trying to make peace with the fact that he didn’t play a role in Ed’s new life in the Narrows. They’d tried to leave each other alone. But something always seemed to pull one back into the other’s orbit.

This time, it was Ed’s jealousy. It was also Oswald’s.

Ed may have known Gordon first, but Oswald had been playing a years-long game of cat and mouse with him since the day they met. They’d threatened one another’s lives enough times that, at least as far as Oswald saw it, Gordon seemed to trust that his own safety was in no real danger anymore. They had too much history now to ever pull the trigger on each other. But for all the grief this righteous acquaintance had caused him, Oswald had no doubt in his mind that if anyone were to kill James Gordon, it would be _him_. He had earned it. Their opposition ran so much deeper than mere jealousy, after all. They were fundamental enemies. It was too pure a dichotomy to allow a third party as chaotic as Edward Nygma to intervene. 

Oswald propped himself up on the edge of the table and took the controller in his hand, cool eyes scanning the space once more before landing again on the massive question mark. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes.

“Ed, you are exhausting.”

He sat on the table another moment, gathering the energy and focus to go back downstairs and continue the search. Just as he was carefully dropping down, landing lightly on his left foot, one of his employees came stomping up the steps. He hurled himself into the loft like an animal, all stealth lost in his excitement. Oswald’s eyes spoke of his disbelief that he hadn’t been able to find anyone with an ounce of stealth or subtlety in what felt like years, and had he the time, he’d have lectured the stampeding man on how disappointed he had become in his own people. But this, he also would have told this brute, was not the time or place for such talk. So he kept his mouth closed and leaned forward expectantly.

“Boss, we just got word that Gordon was spotted back at the station. But, uh, there’s something you gotta see. Next door, at Cherry’s.”

With that, he was stomping down the steps again, leaving Oswald to follow as soon as he’d swallowed down the urge to scream at the man’s unnecessary vagueness. 

As he made his way across the alleyway to Cherry’s, Oswald could hear his heart beating in his ears. The pounding irritated him: there was nothing to be anxious for. Gordon had managed to slip away from Ed one way or another, and he was healthy enough to resume command of his increasingly useless police force. Perhaps, Oswald tried to tell himself, he had left some kind of GCDP weaponry behind. Perhaps the keys to the armory had dropped from his pocket as he wove his way through the Narrows on his escape. The pounding in his chest, of course, told him otherwise.

As he entered the upper level of Cherry’s fight ring, the headquarters for the Queen of the Narrows— another of Thompkin’s labels that made him roll his eyes—, three of his men were standing in the middle of the room, shoulder to shoulder, staring at something on the floor. 

“Wha-? Move,” he commanded, pushing through them and stopping short, breath catching in his throat at the sight of Edward and Lee lying face-up, nearly mirror images of each other, each with a stab wound to the stomach. 

“Get a van. Or a truck. Something big,” he finally ordered, eyes locked on Edward’s pale face. He’d spoken so quietly that his men weren’t sure they’d heard him, but when they didn’t move, he made himself much clearer, shouting, “Go get a transport vehicle before you end up joining them, _please_.”

The men hustled out of the building, leaving Oswald alone with Ed and Lee. He glanced at Lee and simply shook his head, choosing instead to kneel next to Edward’s body. 

When his hand fell on Ed’s shoulder, he saw that his fingers were trembling, so he took a full breath, steadied himself, and rolled his shoulders back to garner some commanding presence. 

“Edward,” he spoke, voice as level as he could manage, “look at me.”

When the man didn’t move, Oswald’s brow furrowed at his disobedience. 

“Okay, don’t look at me. Just…I need to know—” A sniffle escaped him, and he frowned again, this time at himself. “I just need to confirm that…”

Behind him, Lee shifted just slightly, groaning unconsciously as she drew a raspy breath and coughed it out. Oswald turned and glared at her, pointing a sharp finger in her direction. 

“I didn’t ask you.”

While she hadn’t responded to him, she did give him hope that perhaps Ed was not beyond saving. It was at this point that the corner of Oswald’s mouth turned up in a flicker of a grin as he recognized the reach of his possessive nature. All that he could say about Jim Gordon’s life, he could say about Edward Nygma’s. 

He placed his hands on the floor on either side of Edward’s head and lowered his ear to his mouth, listening for breath.

He felt it before he heard it, a light brush of warm air barely grazing his earlobe before dissipating entirely. Oswald’s eyes squeezed closed, and he stayed put, letting two more breaths connect with his skin before pushing himself up. 

“You’ll be okay. You’re going to be okay. I promise, Ed. I’ll fix you. I know what to do. I’ll fix you,” he swore, choking back the lump in his throat and dismissively blinking away the tears that had started to well in his eyes. He sat down fully on the floor, wincing as he stretched his right leg out to the side. 

Once situated and quiet again, he took a moment to observe the perfect stillness in Edward’s face, fair skin gone smooth with expressionlessness. His glasses had fallen askew when he hit the floor, so Oswald carefully pushed them back into place on the bridge of his nose, letting his fingertips linger at Ed’s jaw as he pulled them away. 

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to say this to your face once you’re awake, but…” He took another deep breath and glanced back at Lee, who had fallen eerily still again. Looking back to Ed, he took hold of his limp hand, the one nearest the switchblade that had Oswald had given him as a part of a thank-you gift years ago. He patted the back of Ed’s hand and shook his head. “I told you this would happen.”


	7. Safety

Link dragged his fingertips down his cheek, listening to the friction of thick stubble meeting his fingernails. The sound did not soothe him, necessarily, but it distracted him for a few seconds while his eyes stared just to the left of the television screen. The set glowed with the same blue graphic that had been plastered over every local channel for the past two days: “National Relief Efforts Pending. Stay Tuned For Updates.” The static message had appeared after the repetitive news reports died out just hours after the attack; almost immediately, the national cable channels had turned to snow. Cell service had not returned. Disaster relief crews had not visited the hotel or any building within sight of their balcony. 

They were stranded, in a passive survival mode that meant glancing at the television every so often between shifts of staring out the windows. They had spoken little, each unable to devise any reasonable plan for relocating when they were so unfamiliar with the city. They slept fitfully and ate little, rationing their loads from the kitchen stringently. Link had consistently eaten only enough to stop his pangs of hunger, taking great care to spread out his meals over the course of uneventful days. 

But now, as he lay on the bed staring at the gray sky through the window of his room, idly wondering how he came to be lying on his bed staring at that gray sky through the window of this room, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. His stomach growled, and while he wanted to put a hand over his abdomen, he couldn’t bring himself to move. His body was heavy, weak with worry and exhausted from holding on to a tension unique to the process of survival. He’d had a banana and a jar of nuts on the dresser, but it seemed like miles away, and he couldn’t bring himself to look toward the television again. 

And then he couldn’t bring himself to look at anything but the window. His neck was stiff, frozen in place, and when he tried to blink, his eyes could not be bothered. Out the window, the sun began to set, moving entirely too quickly, causing the sky to darken with a speed alarming enough to send a chill through him. He knew then that he was dreaming, his collapse backward onto his bed proving more productive than a mere expression of helplessness and boredom. He’d fallen asleep in the middle of the afternoon, and that was fine.

What was not fine was the odd sensation swirling across the tips of his fingers as his arm dangled off the side of the bed. With his eyes glued to the window, his fingers buzzed, as if the nerves themselves were vibrating beneath the skin.

The vibration rattled up his hand, spreading over his wrist and intensifying until it turned into pins and needles sticking him from within, as if his hand had started to fall asleep. 

He flexed his hand, stretched his fingers as far as they would go to work out the pinpricks, and when he curled them again, they closed on something cool and solid. The weight of it surprised him as his thumb slid back and forth over an unfamiliar pattern etched into a smooth, hard surface. His fingertip inched up the edge of it and settled on a much warmer, softly curved stretch of metal that perfectly fit against the pad of his finger, as if it was molded to fit him. Deep in the back of his mind, he knew what he was holding. He could almost make it out in his peripheral vision, but his hand had been slung just a bit too far off the bed for his line of sight. 

The metal’s warmth was a welcome reprieve from what seemed to be another cold, drizzly day outside. He wanted to bring it closer to him. Small as it was, he wanted to cradle it against his body and let it heat him up. So he tightened his grip, pulling his finger in toward his palm. 

His body woke before his brain, jolting him into consciousness by forcing him upright on the bed, back board-straight as he looked around him with wide, frantic eyes. From the chair near the window, Rhett perked up, looking at him over a pamphlet he’d read a dozen times. 

“You okay?” Rhett asked. “Nightmare?”

Link nodded and removed his glasses, rubbing his eyes. “I guess so. I didn’t mean to fall asleep.” The words were barely audible, slow and reluctant to come from his mouth, so he cleared his throat and slid his glasses back on, looking to Rhett for an answer he already knew. Rhett shook his head, and that was the end of the silent conversation.

Rhett looked back toward the window and made a suggestion. “We should make another run to the kitchen. Maybe see if we can find the laundry room, get some clean towels and sheets. I’d rather do it now than…I don’t know.”

Link thought for a moment, imagining what the rest of Rhett’s concern could have been, wondering what he thought might happen to the city that would require them to stay long enough to need clean sheets, or what might happen to the hotel that would make it difficult to acquire them later. The towels, though, he could understand. 

And it seemed they were coming up on his limit for how long he could stand to stay locked into just two hotel rooms.

They did not speak for the duration of the trip to the basement, pushing their silver carts slowly, straining to hear any signs of life over the rolling of their wheels. But the hotel was still, fully quiet, whether or not others were occupying it, and by the time they reached the basement, they had relaxed again. 

They rifled through the kitchen for a second time, pulling down bags of granola and dried fruit that hadn’t appealed to them on their first, midnight trip. As Link shopped the massive pantry, this time collecting a more meager armful of non-perishables, Rhett went through the refrigerator, pulling out a massive carton of eggs, a package of cheddar cheese, and a bag of wilting spinach. Link returned to his side just as he was whisking half a dozen eggs into a yellow foam.

“Why not, right?” Rhett said casually, pulling a spatula from a utensil hook nearby. “Might as well have a hot meal while we’re here.” 

“Good idea. While you’re doing that, I’m going to look for the laundry room, find some clean stuff.”

Rhett nodded, but looked up before Link could walk away. They locked eyes, a silent request passing between them that Link acknowledged with a small nod and a gentle slap to Rhett’s shoulder. _Yes, I__’ll be careful._

And it seemed that he was. As far as Rhett could hear, he made no noise as he explored what he could access of closets, offices, and workspaces. Though Rhett was tuned in to a shout for help or any other abnormal noises, there was nothing to hear but the sizzle of a nice meal coming together.

The kitchen had filled with the aroma of crisping bacon by the time Link had returned, and for the circumstances, Rhett was proud of his work: a full breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, buttered toast, and green grapes. 

“It smells like hope in here,” Link announced, rolling in a newly-stocked cart of several clean towels and two sets of cleans sheets. He left most of his delivery by the door, but as Rhett placed a loaded white plate on the counter, a red emergency radio was set down right next to it. His eyes widened as he grabbed it, turning its small crank as he spoke.

“Have you tried this?”

Link hopped up to sit on the counter, digging into his eggs. “Not yet. Didn’t really want to turn it on by myself.” 

Rhett understood. He wasn’t sure he was ready to hear the state of the city, either. But he switched the device on regardless, and adjusted its dial until the static died away. They listened to radio silence for a moment, Rhett picking up his own plate as he stared at the machine. And then came a voice.

“This is Vanessa Harper with the GCPD. A safe zone has been established in the upper west side of downtown, just a few blocks southwest of Robinson Park. We have food and shelter, and if you need us…the GCPD can protect you.”

“Oh my god,” Rhett muttered, stroking a hand heavily over his beard. “We have to get there. They’ll be able to get us home.”

“That’s not that far away. You can see some of the park from our windows.” 

“We’re on the east end. We’ll have to get all the way across the park. We’ll just go through.”

Link nodded as he devoured the hot meal in his hands, seemingly sensing more purpose than ever for regaining some energy. Rhett turned and pushed himself up on the counter to eat too, daring a small smile. 

As they hadn’t expected to be leaving so soon, they left the cart of towels and sheets just outside the kitchen doors, returning to the basement elevator one last time on their way to collect their bags. Link carried the emergency radio in one arm, clutched to his chest as it repeated the same recorded message from the safe zone. When the car arrived, they stepped in quickly, eager to bid a final farewell to the hotel, and Rhett pressed the button for the fourth floor.

As the car began to lift, Rhett pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, sliding his room’s brass key from its outer loop. “Did you see a place to drop these off when we check out?” he asked Link, holding up the key.

Before Link could answer with a joke of his own, the elevator’s bell rang out, drawing both of their gazes up to the lighted numbers above the door. “Lobby” was illuminated.

They each took a single step back, bumping the back wall as the doors opened. On the other side, they were greeted by a pair of men who seemed to belong to the same gang that had terrorized the streets during the evacuation. Rhett bristled and shivered, fingers closing tightly on the silver bar at his back.

“This is a surprise,” the one on the left said coolly as he stuck his boot in the way of the door to stop it from closing. “Haven’t run into anyone new since yesterday morning. Thought for sure we’d be the first to hit this place.”

“We don’t want any trouble,” Rhett said, taking the lead as soon as possible to keep Link from starting any fresh conflicts. “We’re just on our way out, actually. We’re not interested in taking anything but our own bags with us. If we can just—”

“You boys alone?” asked the other man, noticeable sizing up the pair. 

Rhett didn’t know how to answer, and Link seemed to sense that he was leading this conversation, so he kept his mouth shut. A lie could convince the gang to leave them alone, but the chance of a backfire seemed too great.

“Yes. It’s just us. If there’s anyone else here, we haven’t seen them.” 

“A time like this,” said the first man, “there’s real safety in numbers. Seems dangerous you two bein’ out here alone. Who you workin’ for?”

Link could stay quiet no longer, but at least he seemed to understand Rhett’s direction. “We’re not working for anyone. We’re just trying to—” Before he could finish his thought, though, that direction took a sharp turn. 

“Oswald Cobblepot,” interjected Rhett, who tried not to react to Link’s wide-eyed look in his direction. “We work for Penguin. He knows exactly where we are, and he’s expecting our return within the hour. There’s nothing here he wants, so let us grab our bags, and we’ll leave you to it.”

“No one’s seen him in days. They say he’s holed up in City Hall. But I don’t think he’s even on the island.”

“Does it matter?” Rhett asked. “Do you think he doesn’t have the means to settle the score if two of his men go missing? And at a time like this?”

The pairs stared each other down, neither flinching when the elevator chimed, wanting to close its doors and move on. When it made the attempt, the barrel of a shotgun pressed against its metal, keeping it trapped in place. The tension finally broke when the gun’s owner cracked a yellow smile and snorted a laugh, leaning into the elevator to blindly press a button for one of the upper levels, sending the car on its way. As the bell chimed again, he narrowed his eyes at Rhett.

“Tell Penguin the Demonz say ‘hello.’”

There was no way to know for sure, but in the fevered dreams to come, Rhett would swear that the last thing his left hand felt was the pounding of Link’s pulse in his chest as he pushed him out of the spray of shot that tore through his shoulder. It would take days to process the memory, but once the howling and whimpering would subside, he would catch flashes of that moment, staring down mortality in a hotel lobby, and just before half of him dipped into the waters of death, he could feel Link’s heart as clearly as his own.


	8. Red and Green

Deafened by the explosion of a shotgun in such close quarters, Link let the elevator rise to the fourth floor before smashing the emergency brake, holding it in place for half an hour as he sat on his knees, pressing the fabric of his own shirt into the blood pouring from Rhett’s peppered shoulder. Crumpled in the corner of the car, Rhett squeezed his eyes shut and kicked his heel against the floor in a desperate attempt to expel some of the pain’s relentless energy. Eventually, he grew still, desperate panting slowed to shaky inhalations. Link wrapped Rhett’s right arm tightly around his neck and helped lift him to his feet, hobbling down the hall until they reached his room, swung the door open, and stumbled inside, latching every lock on the door behind them. 

Rhett shuffled to the dark bathroom, letting Link take care of switching on the light. When he did so, Rhett flinched, but Link could tell it was not from the sudden brightness of the room. His shirt was drenched, half with sweat, half with blood. The shredded fabric clung to the wound, wove itself into Rhett’s skin with the help of the pellets that had torn through him. 

“This could be worse,” Link had to say twice before Rhett seemed to hear him. “It’s birdshot, right? Could be worse.”

“It was three feet away from me,” Rhett said, wincing again as he sat down on toilet’s lid. “I can’t feel my hand.”

Link swallowed hard. “That’s shock, right? We just have to clean this and…Just stay right here.” He shook his head, wiped his eyes, straightened his glasses, and set about gathering washcloths, soap, and the nail scissors from his own toiletry bag. 

When he returned, Rhett was slumped over on his right arm, leaning against the counter’s edge, dangerously close to falling. 

“Let’s get on the floor. You’re making me nervous,” Link said, earning a pained, pleading look from Rhett’s glistening eyes. “Come on. It’s safer. I’ll help you.” He dropped to his knees and let Rhett use him for support as he made his way slowly to the cold tile floor. 

Link started at the hem, snipping upward slowly, carefully separating the two halves of Rhett’s t-shirt so that they could pull it off. The further up he worked, the more his cuts angled away from the wound, until he made the final snip at the right side of Rhett’s neckline. He pushed the sleeve down Rhett’s right arm fairly easily, Rhett freeing himself from the material without a fight. But when he had to look right at the gunshot, Link felt his stomach turn. He tried to breathe through his nose to conceal his panic, but his hesitation gave him away.

“You don’t have to do this,” Rhett said. “Help me get the shirt off, and I can clean it. I can see it well enough.”

Link wanted desperately to protest. He wanted his reservations to fall away in a swell of heroic grandeur; he wanted to be someone that Rhett could depend on to help him in this novel time of need. He wanted to be someone else.

But he found himself scrubbing a white washcloth into a thick lather and handing it off to Rhett, leaving him to work alone while he returned to his own bathroom and dug through his bag for a pair of tweezers. Once he’d found them, he could have returned to Rhett’s bathroom to keep him company while he washed them and dipped them in hand sanitizer, trying to sterilize them as much as possible. But he didn’t. He worked quickly, but he did so in the safety of his own bathroom, apart from the acrid smell of sweat and blood.

By the time he returned, some life had returned to Rhett’s eyes. Cleaning the injury gave him something to focus on, seemingly taking at least a fraction of his attention away from his pain.

Link handed him the tweezers and went about preparing more clean towels as Rhett started digging shot from his skin. Link flinched with each pellet that hit the floor, but lost count after ten.

An hour later, Rhett had made his way to his bed, shoulder wrapped in towels that were already threatening saturation. He stared at the ceiling; Link stared at him.

“Is the ibuprofen doing anything?”

Rhett swallowed, eyes fixed upward. “It’s weird. It’s almost like four over-the-counter anti-inflammatories aren’t strong enough to mask a shotgun wound.”

Link sighed. “How ‘bout the asshole answer? That make you feel better?”

“A little.”

“I’m glad.”

There was nothing else to say. They let the silence take the room and Rhett closed his eyes, trying to sleep. From his place in the desk chair, Link did the same, preferring total darkness over the ominous pallor of Rhett’s face. 

Link was right. He was right, and he knew it. He was _so_ right that he was hardly bothered by the fact that Rhett couldn’t see it. 

They were running out of food again, a problem of its own, but Rhett needed painkillers, antibiotics, maybe even muscle relaxers, something to cause his body to unravel some of its tension and simply move again. He was never going to be able to make it to the safe zone if he couldn’t even make it out of his bed. His recovery seemed further away with each day that passed. By the third night, he was sleeping most of the time, waking up drenched in sweat, growing less and less interested in drying himself off, turning down Link’s cautious offers to first help him to the shower, and when that seemed impossible, to help him take a sponge bath, or just change clothes. When Link ate, he often did so alone, Rhett turning down what little food they had left. Link allowed it, even if he would _not_ allow his rejection of water.

But he’d caught Rhett’s teeth chattering more than once. He’d heard Rhett’s quiet, pained groans in the middle of the night, when his defenses were down and he thought it safe to hurt freely. Link’s chest ached with his own helplessness as each whimper sliced through him in the dark. Four days after the encounter with the Demonz, he reached his limit. Rhett’s injury was clearly infected, and his body did not have the resources to recover. He needed more than their joint rooms could offer, and Link refused to even consider the prospect of facing death in this hotel. Or even in this city. He had been right to hate the place, he’d realized, and they were going to survive in spite of it.

He’d suggested running out for supplies, and Rhett had immediately shot down the idea. Link let him think that this was wise, that it was entirely too dangerous to risk another trip before the police had cleared the area. They would be here, soon, he agreed, all while looking out the window and planning a route for himself.

He didn’t trust himself to go out at night, so he’d waited until Rhett fell into an uneasy afternoon nap. The journey would be quick, he told himself, so he’d left a note promising his early return. He’d put on his olive jacket and slung his emptied backpack over his shoulder, slipping out into the hallway and keeping the doorknob turned until the door had fully closed, allowing it to latch silently. He held his breath, tiptoeing through the carpeted hallway on high alert, despite the seemingly permanent quiet that had fallen over their floor, hardly blinking until he reached the stairwell. The door creaked, so he pushed it quickly, minimizing the trail of sound he left in his wake. 

At the base of the stairwell, he waited, ear pressed to the door as he listened for movement in the lobby. He checked his watch, and after three minutes of silence, he opened the heavy door and took off again.

His hurried pace came to a standstill once he approached the hotel’s front doors, facing the streets outside on his own for the first time. They were empty as far as he could tell, cars abandoned here and there, some with broken windows, some simply left alone, as if their owners might be back any moment. The gray overcast sky was just bright enough to hurt his eyes, make him squint a little as he set his jaw and stepped out of the safety of the building.

His legs carried him quickly, more quickly than he expected, considering how tired he’d felt ever since they’d made it back to their room after their evacuation attempt. He tried to rest any time Rhett did, but it was an unfamiliar, light and fickle sleep, his brain always on alert for footsteps in the hallway, for signs of life, for promises of rescue or something more sinister. Now, though, he was full of energy, his focus fueled by fresh adrenaline and the potential to do real good. He wanted Rhett to feel better, to regain his sense of humor, to respond to his bad jokes with something more than a labored exhalation. The light was missing from his eyes, and Link wanted it back. And while there may not have been many potential saviors to choose from, no small part of Link relished the prospect of being the one to provide the relief. In some small and temporary way, he could be a hero.

The door to the pharmacy had been broken open, causing Link to clench his jaw in frustration before slipping through the makeshift entrance. He ducked, listened for footsteps or voices, and when he heard neither, he proceeded to scan the aisles for anything of use. He first padded toward the small snack department, sighing at what little remained. Some West Coast version of himself was shaking his head as Link shoved fistfuls of beef jerky and sugared trail mix into his backpack, layering it with the few obscure candy bars that were left on the shelves. He topped it with a combination of dried fruit and honey buns, turning toward the darkened coolers to grab some bottles of water. With a majority of his bag filled with food, he made for the medical supplies and painkillers, trying to determine what could help Rhett the quickest while also attempting to predict just what kinds of emergencies they might face on their way to the safe zone and out of the city, whatever that route might entail. His knee touched down on the floor in front of the nearly empty shelves of aspirin and acetaminophen, grabbing one bottle of each and packing them into the front pocket of his bag. He’d have to find a way behind the pharmacist’s counter for the more powerful options.

He rifled the center aisles for soap, foregoing shampoo and conditioner for a body wash that claimed to do it all. His stylist would never let him hear the end of it. What a luxury it suddenly seemed, to be lectured from the comfort of a cushy salon chair.

He darted around the far side of the store, grabbing razors and travel-sized laundry detergent before setting his sights on the medical supplies.

Link started toward the end of the aisle where he could see a few boxes of bandages and ointments hanging, but a hitched breath caught his ear over the eerie silence of the pharmacy’s still air. He crouched again, ducking safely under the height of the empty shelves, and cursed himself for not paying enough attention to his surroundings. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed the presence before, and now, at the back of the building, he was too far from the door to make a fast getaway.

Over his own heartbeat, he could just make out a series of shallow exhalations, each choked off with a frustrated grunt. As he crawled along the length of the bottom shelf, Link put together that he was hearing the familiar sounds of someone in great pain. The instinctual response was relief, gratitude that he could likely outrun someone wounded. And for a fleeting moment, he considered having to fight someone off. Yes, he thought before dismissing the notion altogether. That was something he could do. If it came to it.

He secured the straps over both of his shoulders and crept to the edge of the row, coiling into a sprinter’s stance as he held his breath and peeked into the aisle containing the bandages. 

In the center of the aisle, a man lay half-propped on the lowest shelf, legs sprawled on the floor, sweat beading on his sickly pale skin, left hand pressed tight to his stomach as he tried to tear open a package of gauze with his teeth. The sight of blood soaking through the center of his white shirt turned Link’s stomach. He tried to retreat, to stay hidden as he thought over his options, but before he could move, he noticed the small handgun lying two feet from the man. He blinked as his brain went silent, animal instincts taking over. When he looked again to the wounded man and found him staring right back at him through heavy-lidded eyes, the butterflies in Link’s stomach turned to flames. He’d prepared to flee, but instead, he lunged, scrambled toward the gun and reached it before a bloody hand slapped down on the floor, leaving a smeared print on the white tile.

The injured man rolled onto his side, left hand returning to his stomach as his head came to rest on the floor. The pistol was cold in Link’s hand. It was heavier than it looked, but his fingers gripped tight as he kept it at his side. 

“Is this a citizen’s arrest?” the man asked, coughing at the end of the question and wincing. After a slow, careful breath, he added, “Don’t tell me you were planning on paying for _your_ merchandise.” 

Link rolled his shoulders back and glanced at the bloody hand print between them, then asked in a quiet, level voice, “What happened to you?”

* * *

It was a simple enough question. _What happened to you?_

Yet it hung in the air, suspended by a plethora of answers, none of which were coming to mind in the form of complete sentences or even coherent phrases. He’d spent his articulation on a pointless quip about shoplifting, and now he was stricken dumb in the face of the most basic of inquiries. What had he been through? Why couldn’t he answer?

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “If you’re going to kill me—”

“Whoa,” the man said, throwing up his hands in defense as if one of them wasn’t holding a gun, “I’m not going to do that! Jeez!” 

He narrowed his eyes, trying to make them focus, to register the face of his company. 

“What are you going to do, then?” 

“What’s your name?” the man asked, slowly lowering to his knees, taking in the mess around them. 

“Edward. Ed.”

“Ed, I’m Link. I don’t want to cause you any trouble.”

Ed snickered. “You’re not from here.”

Link chewed his lip. “So…you gonna be okay, or…?”

Ed laughed and immediately winced again. He craned his neck to look at his stomach, delicately peeling the damp shirt upward, uncovering a partially-sutured wound, framed by angry bruises. He thought he heard Link curse under his breath, but he couldn’t be bothered to look up for confirmation. 

“I thought so. Broken stitches.”

“What? Who did them? How do we get in touch with them?” Link asked, a poorly coded announcement that he did not want to come any closer. 

Ed shook his head before letting it fall back to the floor. The dark behind his eyelids was comforting. It allowed him to separate from the searing pain in his abdomen. He didn’t know how long he’d floated there when he was jostled out of it by a harshly whispered, “Hey!”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know!” he tried to shout, but his voice cracked and failed him. “But I wish you’d make up your mind.”

“What?” Link asked, apparently his favorite question. 

“Whether you’re going to kill me or help me. I think just sitting there counts as the former.”

“I don’t—I can’t—I am not—”

“I’ll talk you through it,” Ed groaned, growing more irritated by this encounter by the second. “I can’t keep my hands steady enough.”

This time, he knew he heard a laugh. He peered at Link, who shook his head and apologized quickly.

“I can’t do that. I don’t say this with any pride, but I could just about pass out—”

“You’re right,” Ed interrupted, quickly losing his grip on consciousness. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten here, whether he’d walked, or driven, or if he’d been running from something, to something. He presumed he’d been stabbed, but couldn’t remember his attacker. It could have been this Link character for all he knew. 

Something about the pallor that washed over this man from just _looking_ at the blood told Ed otherwise, though. He decided on what he figured would be his final words, and thought that someone in the world, someone who appreciated his wit and bite would have liked them: “It will be far less traumatic to just stand by and watch a helpless stranger die than to get a little blood on your hands.”

“Oh my god,” Link muttered, slipping the backpack off his shoulders and setting it on the floor behind himself. He lay the gun on top of it. 

“It has to be cleaned, the wound. There could be saline around here…or just use water,” he suggested, but Link was already rummaging the shelves, tearing plastic off a brown bottle and cracking its seal easily. Ed had closed his eyes again, started breathing in a calculated pattern of slow and deep inhalations, willing himself to stay conscious. The instant the liquid hit his wound, though, his eyes shot open, and he filled his lungs with air in order to growl it out through gritted teeth. Link flinched from the sound, bracing for a fist to strike out from its source.

“Alcohol was not my first choice,” Edward finally said, panting through the sting. Link shook his head.

“Sorry—it was the first thing I saw. I told you—”

“It’s fine. There’s a suture kit right there,” he said, nudging a first aid kit with his knee. Link began inspecting the instruments, swallowing thickly. 

“I threaded the needle, the curved one there, while I could. Just grab the driver, the needle driver. You’ll use that to push it through.”

“Through…”

“Through the tissue. The skin. The sides of the hole in my stomach.”

Link gritted his jaw and Ed quickly regretted his rudeness. This man was not the perfect choice to tie him back together, but he was the only one available.

“It’ll only take a few. Maybe three or four, and you’re done,” he explained, voice softer. Link nodded and leaned forward, holding his breath as he inspected the injury up close. He gagged, had to look away and steady himself with several deep breaths before continuing his examination. And then he squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, perhaps trying to will himself to teleport out of the building, away from this nightmare. But eventually, he looked down at Edward again, and reached for the tools.

Ed watched Link’s hands as they clung to the thin steel needle driver, fingers curled tightly through its circular handles. They transfixed him, their tremors a discouraging promise of what was to come. He began talking through the process anyway, lying flat on his back and resisting the urge to prop himself up and watch the work. The wound was too high for such an option, and the blind faith in this stranger was hurting him as much as the shaky push and pull of a long curved needle moving through his skin.

“Where are you from?” he asked when he could offer no more direction. Link focused on his work, carefully tying a knot in the first stitch. 

“Los Angeles.”

“Why didn’t you get out?”

“Tried. Didn’t make it to the bridge in time.”

Ed closed his eyes and tried not to let his abdomen tense up in anticipation of the next puncture. When it came, he hissed and balled his fists at his side. 

“Sorry.”

“You’re doing fine.”

“I need to get into the pharmacy. I need antibiotics and, I don’t know, Percocet. Vicodin.”

Ed shook his head. “I appreciate the offer, but I think a triple antibiotic ointment and a secure bandage should do the trick. I don’t think much survived that alcohol bath—”

“Not for you.”

Had so much of his blood not leaked onto the floor, Ed might have felt some rush into his cheeks. “Oh.”

“Any idea how to get in there?” Link asked. Ed let his head fall to the left, examining the grate over the counter and the wooden access door to the dispensary. It had a lever handle with a traditional knob lock. _How quaint._

Ed rolled his shirt down over the fresh bandage and pushed himself up, leaning against the shelves as he caught his breath against the burn in his stomach. He watched Link pour alcohol over his own hands and clean what he could of the blood from his fingers, wiping them repeatedly over his pants. His hands trembled still, seemingly more so now that they weren’t occupied. His adrenaline was visibly dissipating, and he looked shaken, worn. 

“What are the antibiotics for?” Ed asked. “Are you a doctor?” He bore the sting that it took to laugh just once at his own joke, then settled for an amused grin. Link smiled wryly. 

“You’re a comedian. Thank god.”

They stared one another down, and in doing so, Ed realized what he was missing. 

“Is there a pair of glasses around here?”

Link scanned the aisle, checked the shelves at eye-level, and then clicked his tongue. He reached for the mess of bloodied, crinkled gauze packages, and plucked a pair of tortoiseshell clubmasters from beneath it. 

When Ed slid them on, Link’s face came fully into focus, and he let himself stare a moment at the contrast of bright eyes against dark brows, shadows of exhaustion creeping in from the corners, somehow highlighting the shock of blue. For a moment, as they stared into the floor, those eyes inspired an obscure thrill of nostalgia.

He cleared his throat, pushing the odd sensation down, suffocating it beneath a fresh wave of self-preservation. Too long of a delay could bring the gun back into play.

“If you can find hair pins or paper clips, I can get that door open.”

Link startled back to life, rubbing his eyes with the relatively clean span of his forearm, and then pushed himself up to scour the store anew. As he did so, Ed considered trying to stand, but quickly decided that he could more easily crawl to the dispensary door. He let his eyes fall closed and collapsed against it to wait, tracking the footsteps padding through the haircare aisle. When they headed his direction again, he opened his eyes just in time to see Link using his teeth to break the plastic band on a sleeve of pins. Ed’s stomach dropped at the sight of his sharp, glinting canines, but he shuddered and shook it off, dismissing it as an effect of his injury. 

Though he hadn’t the dexterity for field sutures, he could manage two hairpins in a basic knob lock. With a few steadying breaths and a fleeting moment of trial-and-error, he felt the tumblers fall into place and the lock give way. He tested the knob, and when it opened, a proud smile stretched across his face. It was hardly dampened by Link’s gruff expression of gratitude.

“Of course you know how to do that,” he’d said, pushing past Ed to search the shelves of the dispensary. 

“What are you treating?” Ed asked from his place on the floor. 

“Infected gun shot to the shoulder. Shotgun.”

Ed grimaced. “Ouch. Look for cephalexin. Keflex. Or Augmentin, that’d work, too. And find an ointment. How’s it being treated now?”

“Are _you_ a doctor?” Link asked without Ed’s earlier sarcasm, as he skimmed the labels.

“No, but I have some medical experience.”

“It’s not being treated. He cleaned it with bar soap and covered it with a towel.”

Ed snorted, though his own injury punished him for it again. 

When Link heard him, he grumbled, “That’s why I’m _here_.”

Ed listened as Link swept boxes and bottles into his backpack, idly wondering what sorts of drugs he was finding. Not so long ago, he’d sworn off the temptations of mind-altering substances, his habit of hallucination seeming too dangerous a vulnerability to exploit. But after waking up in unfamiliar places more times than he could count in the last few days, it hardly seemed like much more harm could be done. Maybe a little something might help him find some answers.

Or at least figure out the questions.

Edward cleared his throat. “If, uh…if you see Cybinol or anything with the ingredient psilocybin in it, could you toss it to me?”

Link said nothing, but a few seconds later, a white box slid out through the doorway and into Edward’s leg. 

“Thank you,” he said, slowly reaching to pick it up.

The large bottle inside was a deep green plastic, filled with at least fifty tiny white pills. The promise of their relief was almost enough to convince him to take one right there on the floor, but with uncertain company, he decided against it. He needed his senses sharp should this seemingly benevolent encounter take a turn.

And yet, by the time Link was pulling his pack back onto his shoulders and stepping out of the dispensary, Edward still had not figured out his next move. He’d been too focused on patching up his knife wound to consider much of his future. 

“You’re going back?” he asked, as if the answer was not obvious. Link nodded. 

“Thanks for your help with the lock. You’re the first stranger I’ve met that hasn’t tried to hurt me. Then again, you really just didn’t get to this in time,” he said, raising his right hand to show off the pistol he clearly intended to keep.

“You’re taking my gun?”

Link nodded and started walking toward the front of the store, already eyeing the streets through the broken door.

Edward climbed to his feet, hands clawing the at the shelves nearby to help him up as his abdomen seared like lightning moving through his skin. “Wait.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything else for you. I have to go,” Link said, this time not looking back.

“I don’t know where I came from. I don’t remember where I live. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing, where I’m supposed to go.”

Link shook his head. “I’ve done all I can. I’m sorry.”

“I can treat the gunshot. I can clean it and patch it up for you. If it’s really infected, it may need to be debrided. You up for that?”

“I’ll take my chances.”

“Will _he_? What would he say if he knew you were turning down someone with serious experience studying and working with anatomy and biology because you were scared?”

“You had a gun!”

“It’s Gotham,” Ed replied, half smiling as he shrugged, attempting an expression of innocuous sheepishness.

Link paused, then blew out a deep breath through his nose.

“What experience do you have? You said you’re not a doctor.”

“I was the medical examiner for the GCPD,” he said. But when the words left his mouth, they didn’t sound right. He withdrew, furrowing his brow and looking to the floor. “I worked in forensics first.” This felt more solid, so he said it again. “Forensics for the police department. Before all of—” he waved his left arm to include the destruction of the entire city in the gesture, “—_this.__”_

Link narrowed his eyes. “So your patients weren’t alive.”

“Certainly not by the time I was done with them,” he said, though he didn’t know why. In any other context, it may have been funny, but Link’s obvious distaste for his humor made him close his eyes and shake his head. “Sorry. No, they weren’t alive, but I figured out _why_ they weren’t alive, so maybe I can keep your friend from ending up like them.” 

“And you have some kind of head injury?”

Ed bristled at the suggestion, but nodded anyway. “But this kind of work is like riding a bike.”

“Hmph. We’ll see about that. Radio says there’s a safe zone around the police department. Just east of here, on the other side of the park.”

Ed nodded and sighed, leaning hard into his character in order to avoid abandonment. He didn’t care for the notion of meeting anyone new, but he tried to embrace the possibility that this person might be nicer than Link. “Maybe that’s where I was headed. I think I was trying to get over there so I could help out after this healed.” He glanced at his stomach for emphasis. “Someone there might know what happened to me.”

Link thought for a moment, and while he did so, Ed used every fiber of muscle he had to stand up straight, to stop leaning on the shelves, proving that he could keep up if given the chance, _trying_ to prove that he was a force to be reckoned with. Neither felt true.

But to his surprise, Link said, “Okay. You help him out, and we can make the trip together. But so help me if you try anything,” he warned, fingers flexing around the grip of the gun. Edward wasn’t entirely convinced of his willingness to use it, but he appreciated the gesture. He raised his right hand solemnly.

“On my honor, only here to help.”


	9. Gone and Gone

Link growled in frustration. The length of Ed’s legs put them at eye-level with each other, but they could not seem to match pace as they made their way back to the hotel. Link would slide around a car, kneeling to hide himself from anyone else prowling the street, and upon glancing back, he’d find Ed standing upright, clenching his jaw as he shuffled along seemingly unworried about being seen. He couldn’t slink as quickly as Link could, but his potential to help Rhett heal enough for them to make their way to the safe zone made him worth waiting for. 

“I was supposed to be back forty minutes ago,” Link whispered, an obvious edge to his voice. 

“Forgive me for not wanting to break open another set of stitches. I don’t know that your work holds up to running just yet,” Ed hissed back as he caught up to the hiding spot across the street from the hotel’s entrance. 

They stared at each other, each waiting for another snipe. Eventually, Ed huffed a loaded exhalation and gestured palm up to their destination. “After you.” 

Another glance down both sides of the street told Link it was safe to cross, and he did so quickly, backpack bobbing on his shoulders, full of the snacks and supplies that Rhett desperately needed. By the time he’d reached the hotel’s front door, he’d warmed to Ed, newly hopeful in his mysterious “medical experience.” 

He pushed the door quietly, holding it open behind him as Edward slipped in, wincing when his side brushed the door frame.

“I think I stayed here once,” Ed started to say before he was hushed by Link’s raised hand. Link slowed and allowed Ed to catch up, though they didn’t make eye contact in order to focus on their surroundings. Much of the furniture was knocked over, shoved out of place, its delicate upholstery torn by rough and careless hands. 

“This is where we were ambushed,” Link whispered. “They stopped the elevator at the lobby and held us up.”

The hotel barely even creaked around them. Its main level was as silent as when Link had left it, even if it somehow didn’t feel the same. He attributed the tension in his neck to the memory of staring down a shotgun’s barrel.

“Looks like they’re gone,” Ed whispered back. Link squinted and smiled with sarcastic gratitude, as if he hadn’t just crossed this floor two hours prior. He turned from the path to the elevator in lieu of taking the stairs, anticipating a complaint that did not come. He supposed even this Edward character could appreciate how dangerous the city had become. And he didn’t even know where he came from.

By the fourth floor, Ed’s breathing was strained, his hand tucked tightly to his stomach, though he made no protest. He trusted Link to listen at the stairwell door, to pull it open slowly, to creep along the hall on the balls of his feet to the right door. When he stopped to pull out his key, Ed leaned against the wall, face turned back toward their traveled path, brow beaded with sweat that he either did not notice or did not have the capacity to brush away. 

Link ignored the sneaking suspicion that he was bringing in one barely-alive man to care for another, telling himself this was the best he could do. And if it had proven a grave mistake, at least the gun tucked in his waistband might help get them out of it. 

He turned the key and pushed the door open just a few inches, speaking softly into the opening. “Rhett? It’s me. I’m coming in, and I brought help.”

He wasn’t surprised at the lack of response, so he entered his room, his bag slipping off his shoulders as he made his way to the connecting door. The bag hit the floor, and for a moment, Link thought he might, too.

He took in the scene instantly: the door to the darkened bathroom was open, the desk area was untouched and empty, and the bed was both unmade and unoccupied, a body-sized indentation still visible in sheets bleached white, with a rusty brown stain in their upper corner. The top of the dresser was notably empty, the few clothes that had been folded on its surface seemingly packed into the backpack that had left the room with Rhett.

Over his shoulder, Link heard Ed inhale as if to speak, but no words followed. He shook his head several times, trying to make sense of Rhett’s absence, before he finally turned around to face his new companion.

“I don’t understand this. He wouldn’t even move this morning. Where could…why…where…”

Ed slid past him into Rhett’s room, scanning it for answers to questions Link couldn’t seem to articulate. He checked the bathroom, flipping the light on and quickly back off, chewing his lip as he returned to the bedroom. His hand came to rest on the sheet, testing it for body heat, and when he seemed to find none, he shook his head. A slip of paper resting between the creases of the comforter caught his eye. He plucked it out of the covers and read it, speaking only the last line aloud.

“‘Back by five.’ Oops.” He looked pointedly at the clock showing 5:52 and sucked a breath through bared teeth. “And you didn’t tell him where you were going.”

“Thanks, yes, I know.”

“So it’s unlikely he’d know where to go to find you if he thought you were—”

“Safe zone. That’s where we were headed. If he thought something went wrong, he may have gone for the police.”

Ed grimaced; Link didn’t bother reading into it.

“That’s all I know to do. I have to get across the park.”

Ed dropped the note and scrunched his nose. “I don’t love that idea.”

Link’s brow furrowed, less with concern over why Edward would want to avoid the police and more with a genuine sense of bewilderment as to why he should care what Ed thought at all. 

“_You _wanted to come with _me_. You just tried to convince me to let you help, and now you want to, what? See if he comes back around? Not happening. I’m not leaving him out there on his own. Come with me or don’t; it makes no differen—oh my god,” he broke off his own rant at the sight of an apologetic, sheepish smile spreading over Ed’s face. He growled for the second time that day, body tightening under the tension of so much going wrong so quickly. 

“You just wanted a place to stay. You and your amnesia just wanted to hole up somewhere other than—I can’t believe I’m even…”

Ed tried to protest. “Not originally, really. But there’s no one here now, and—”

Link closed the distance between them in three quick strides, and though Ed tried to step out of the way, he couldn’t move fast enough to avoid Link’s hands landing on either side of his chest and shoving him backward.

“Ow!” Ed cried, pressing his palm against the wound that Link suddenly wanted to break open again. 

“Take it. Enjoy your stay,” Link spat, turning to grab his backpack and heading toward the door.

Ed sputtered after him, still sprawled back on the bed, holding his stomach. “I just really need to shower, and there’s a—wait! Can I have my gun back?”

Link’s fist yanked the door open, quiet caution abandoned for reckless panic, shallow breath and heavy footfalls that propelled his body at the same frantic pace as his spiraling thoughts. He didn’t even bother to reply; the slam of the door answered for him.

By the time Link reached the entrance of Robinson Park, he sensed he had only half an hour of light left. While the perimeter of the park was finely manicured, at its center was a dense forest, a collection of trees doing their best to counter the carbon dioxide produced by a typically-packed city. He hadn’t seen anyone on his trek to the edge of the park, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that no company was good company, so he set himself on a course following the setting sun and took off into the woods.

In the relative privacy of the woods, he could relax enough to let his mind wander. As his feet carried him over protruding roots and fallen branches, he considered how Rhett must have felt waking up alone, abandoned in his convalescence. He considered how afraid he must have felt, for Link, for himself, or both. In his feverish state, he must have been overcome with the same panic that was only just starting to seep out of Link’s body, some overwhelming impulse that told him to run, to bear the agony of movement and get to safety. This, at least, was Link’s hope. The more he considered it, the less sense he could make of it, but logic hardly mattered anymore. He didn’t need to justify Rhett’s disappearance; he just needed to resolve it. 

Somewhere along the line, perhaps not long after he’d nearly slipped on a moss-covered log, he’d started panting through dry lips to catch the breath he couldn’t believe he’d lost. Each time his thoughts circled back to an image of Rhett making this trip to the safe zone, wincing and gasping through the pain of his wicked wound, Link’s chest tightened and his footing faltered. He had to focus on something else, something less pressing.

So he played back his brief encounter with a local. He’d wanted to avoid the more gruesome details of their time together, but it gnawed at him that he’d done more for this stranger than he’d been able to do for Rhett. Of course, he tried to keep in mind that Rhett had offered to take care of himself. Ed had not given him an out other than to sit by and watch a helpless man die. He did not care for the fact that he’d responded so well to such an ultimatum, but there were only so many deaths he could watch in a week. Still, he hated giving in to those sorts of power plays, and yet he couldn’t deny that he appreciated their effectiveness. And he appreciated the boldness required of a perfect stranger to speak to him as Edward had. There was a confidence to the man that he couldn’t quite figure out, considering he’d claimed not to know where he’d earned his injury or who had fixed it up. Something about him, it hardly surprised Link to realize, was just a little _off_.

But a connection to the police department, even through a former medical examiner, would have been nice. If Rhett wasn’t already at the safe zone, Link couldn’t help but wonder if Ed would have persuaded the remaining officers to prioritize finding him. The more he thought about that scenario, however, the less likely it seemed. This just hadn’t stricken him as a town where people helped one another.

The sun had fully set during his trip across the park, and he suspected he’d only made it about halfway through the forest. His legs had grown tired, seeming to realize how hard they’d worked on so little rest and so little fuel. He hadn’t broken into the food stored in his bag; it had hardly felt pressing when Rhett was suddenly missing. But the woods were surprisingly wild for their urban location, and the terrain wore him out.

Link stopped and leaned against a thin tree to dig a water bottle out of his pack. Opening the plastic seal took several attempts, his hands trembling violently. He forwent using his fingernails for his teeth and bit into the cap, pocketing the thin plastic before gulping down mouthfuls of water. He drank until his body told him it needed to breathe, and then he drank right past the warning. It was automatic, spurred by a thirst that demanded quenching at any cost. When the bottle ran dry, he slumped against the tree trunk and gasped for breath, dark spots floating at the edges of his vision. As he sucked in the cool air, he caught a ribbon of floral scent, springy and surprisingly potent for the season. Its sweetness soothed him, but even as his breathing grew regular, his head continued to swim, vision blurring into a tunnel. It amused him, so he chose not to resist it and slid down the rough bark until he was planted on the ground, legs straight out in front of him, coming in and out of focus as he tried to swallow with a desperately dry throat. The ground was cold, and he shivered through his jacket, pulling his arms around himself and letting his eyes close for just a moment, he told himself, just long enough to gather his strength after pushing himself a little too hard. 

Behind his closed eyes, his thoughts fell back to the night that preceded everything starting to crumble around them. He was drawn back to their private car, en route to the hotel from the club that had belonged to Oswald Cobblepot, or Penguin, or whatever his name was. For a moment, the floral scent was replaced with a distant waft of Rhett’s own, the cologne he’d stopped wearing still lingering in some of his clothes, his shampoo still radiating an air of freshness with which Link wanted to fill his lungs. He leaned to the right, relaxing into the memory, starting to truly rest, and could almost feel Rhett’s shoulder catching him, holding him safely upright, for the most part, sharing some of his body heat. The memory bled forward in time, landing him in a familiar hotel room, half-eaten room service plates littering every surface but the bed, a fit of laughter threatening to bubble out of his throat as he anticipated Rhett’s return from the bathroom. He came out just as Link knew he would, wearing a white t-shirt and gray boxer briefs, perfectly comfortable in such a state of undress, at home with their lack of barriers. Link’s fingers curled into the sheets at his chest. They were paper thin and crisp, crumbling in his grasp, but he didn’t mind. 

Rhett caught him staring and smiled, an expression that needlessly asked what Link might be looking at. He sat on the edge of the bed and stared back, somehow slowing the seconds to a crawl, holding Link in his gaze, filling him with some unnameable sensation that promised to keep him alive even as his breathing slowed. 

“You’re tired. Close your eyes,” Rhett suggested, voice deep and airy, a whisper that Link could feel land on his cheek and slip down his jaw, the words tracing a light circle around his neck, tightening against his skin until his own grin fell.

He opened his mouth to speak, but Rhett shook his head gently, letting him know no words were necessary.

They wouldn’t help.

Link sensed that Rhett might come closer if he closed his eyes, and as there simply wasn’t much fight left in him, he started to let his eyelids fall. 

Someone huffed, a wordless expression of exasperation.

His eyes opened again, and Rhett had leaned just a bit closer, resting on his forearm, about to slip into the covers. He shook his head once more, giving Link permission to fully rest, promising he’d still be there when they both woke in the morning.

So he tried again, sinking deeper into the crisp sheets, letting everything in his body relax: neck, shoulders, legs, face, lungs, heart.

And then fingers landed on the skin of his neck, but they were cold and intrusive, short nails scraping against his throat as they tried to pull the warmth away from him. He fought it, tipped his head back further into the blackness, seeking the comfort he was promised, trying to escape this thief of his rest.

“Come on, come on, come on,” the intruder said, tugging the covers from Link’s body, exposing him to newly frigid air. 

The fingers went for his neck again, successfully separating him from his source of heat and pressure, unbinding his throat. Shocked by the sudden ability to draw a breath, his chest filled itself with damp air, then coughed it out just as quickly. His fingers began to move, reaching for his own neck and tearing away what felt like vines.

He underwent a crash course relearning how to breathe, and once his consciousness had started responding to the new oxygen, he slowly let his eyes drift open. 

He was on the ground, covered with leaves, some long dead, some oddly verdant, and to his left lay a bundle of broken vines, clearly pulled from a loop around his neck. Just beyond the vines, another mass of emerald green sent sparks of confusion crackling through him. 

What felt like hours later, he cracked his eyes open again and as his head was hung limply forward, he saw himself walking, feet moving without much coordination, one inconsistently slapping down in front of the other as his legs seemingly pushed themselves over dead leaves and black earth until he didn’t want to watch them anymore. When he looked again, they were stumbling over asphalt with such imbalance that he couldn’t understand how he was staying upright. He couldn’t bring himself to raise his head, but when he checked in with the rest of his body, he found his left arm slung around a long neck, wrist gripped tightly against a bony shoulder. A stiff arm had wrapped around his back and bunched the excess material of his jacket into a ball, holding it tightly at his waist to support him. 

In his fog of delirium, he was fascinated with how light his body felt, held up by this external force. He smiled to himself, closed his eyes again, and let his legs relax just to see if he could float. 

“No,” a gruff voice chastised him, somewhere off to his left. He didn’t listen at first; he was too entertained by the fact that he hadn’t yet hit the ground. “Don’t do that,” the voice spoke again. “Just walk.”

It sounded angry, far more tense than Link felt, so he tried to soothe it by putting his feet under himself again and watching them stumble forward. This is when he was transfixed by the fist in the fabric of his coat. It was attached to an arm wearing a deep green blazer that reflected the glow of each street lamp under which it crossed. He liked it.

It took half a block worth of stumbling before he recognized it. His tongue was heavy in his mouth, and just the idea of speaking exhausted him, so he condensed his thought as much as he could, and through a voice as dry as the leaves still clinging to his own jeans, he uttered a single word: “Mine.”

When this earned no response, he gathered all his strength, and flung his head up, though in reality, the motion was much slower and uncontrolled than it had felt. His neck went limp again. This time, as his head lay on his own left shoulder, chin in the air, he looked into the face of his walking partner. 

They stumbled together as he laughed. Then Edward pushed them onward.

“Walk,” he said, causing Link to furrow his brow. 

Still he stared at the side of Edward’s grimacing face. The expression made him sad; all he wanted was for everyone to have a good time. This is what the haze in his head repeated to him as he lifted his right hand from its lifeless dangle and let it fall over Ed’s fist at his waist. 

Ed’s eyes closed in momentary irritation. He shook his head, but said nothing.

Link snorted a laugh to himself and tried to bat his eyes, though he could only get his right to consistently blink. When Ed still wouldn’t look at him, he opened his mouth for a lungful of air and concentrated deeply on getting the words right: “Put-somethin’-in-my-drink? Er-am-I-juss-a-cheap-date?”

They were slurred but intelligible, so he celebrated with a broad smile.

Ed finally turned his head, and the intensity of his gaze momentarily extinguished all playfulness from Link’s body. 

“If you’d put this much effort into walking, we’d be there.”

Something roiled in Link’s stomach, a flutter that rippled up his chest and into his throat. 

He let his head roll back down and tried to focus again on his feet, though his fingers did not release Ed’s fist. 

“Where’s the fire?” he muttered, meaning to lighten the mood but forgetting to add any inflection to the words. Ed answered so quietly that Link wondered if he was even meant to hear.

“I don’t want to forget where I’m going.”

Link winced as he was dropped on the hallway floor. His legs were worn out by the disaster that was trying to climb three flights of stairs, and when Ed needed to set to work on the apartment’s locks, he had no qualms about simply letting go of Link, letting him slide down a rough wall. The door at his side eventually rolled open, and Ed laughed with pride. 

“Pins from the pharmacy?” Link asked, looking up in wonder at the surprisingly resourceful man. Ed nodded and extended his hand, pulling Link back up and guiding him into the studio apartment. 

Link could tell he was being guided toward the wooden chair beside an upright piano, but when he spotted the neatly made bed, he found the will to tear himself away and stumble toward it, collapsing face first into its pillows. Behind him, Ed sighed in resignation. The sound of it made Link smile against the cotton pillowcase. Whatever had drugged him would no doubt leave a nasty hangover, and he wanted to sleep through as much of it as he could. But his hopes were dashed when he was turned over by a rough pull on his arm.

“Don’t fall asleep.”

“Nooo, what? No. Don’t say that.” Link squeezed his eyelids closed. 

“I didn’t drag you out of those woods just to watch you die in my bed. I’m not going through that again.”

A pinprick of sobriety deflated the joy right out of Link’s spinning lightshow of a brain. He pushed himself up on an elbow and peered at Ed, who looked equally confused about what he’d just said. Link cleared his throat.

“Come again?”

Ed shook his head, pressing one hand to his stomach and using the other to push his glasses up. “Maybe you _should_ sleep. It’s the middle of the night. Whatever those plants did is probably out of your system enough by now…”

“No, no,” Link answered, sitting up fully. “I’m awake.”


	10. New Friends

The day had been long, full of raids that took quick, clever planning, and even sharper execution. While half his men started work on refurbishing a long-retired ammunition factory, the other half roamed farther west by the hour, looting the most upscale businesses they could find. For these efforts, Oswald been rewarded the furniture, hardware, and linens to fully upgrade City Hall to a comfortably luxurious base of operations. Offices would be converted to private quarters, complete with beds and bureaus, though naturally, he’d had to explain, they would have to start with his own. A good leader needed his sleep, after all.

The streets had grown increasingly unpredictable in the week since the bridges blew, and even the average civilians were becoming more dangerous as their fear and desperation had begun to wear on them. With his base renovations underway, he’d decided that this would be his last outing for a while. He’d had a private motive for joining his men on the streets, but as the days went on, he had come to terms with just how improbable it would be to stumble across one particular man, especially when it was likely that this man hadn’t even left Strange’s custody. Bringing someone back from the dead was not necessarily quick work. He of all people should have known this.

He hadn’t established a hard perimeter for his turf yet, but he and his dozen or so men had traveled a bit too far from City Hall for his comfort. 

“This is it for the night, gentlemen. Clean out those shops, and we’re heading back. I prefer to return by sundown, so if you’re not back to the trucks in about twenty minutes, you’ll be left behind,” Oswald announced, sending his followers scampering toward the doorways of the handful of businesses lining the street. Two stayed behind, holding steady at his side, scanning the streets for potential threats. They were large men, intimidating guards, but they were heavy footed and, after an afternoon spent in such proximity, Oswald had come to realize that they both breathed quite loudly. Everything about them was starting to grate on him.

It had been a few hours since they had run into any survivors, so he dismissed them with a confident smile and a wave of his hand. “Go. Enjoy yourselves. Get something nice. I’m going around the corner for a moment,” he said, nodding toward the nearest intersection. “Don’t be late.”

They were a rather quick to plod away from him, he thought, but the gun resting on his own shoulder seemed like protection enough for these empty storefronts.

He crossed the intersection and read the few signs lining the awnings, stopping to peer through the windows of the corner drugstore and rolling his eyes at its already-ransacked shelves. And then the lights at the grand entrance to an old boutique hotel flickered on, and he smiled to himself.

He was hardly surprised to find the building unlocked, and even less surprised by the state of its lobby. Still, the overturned furniture made him momentarily reconsider letting his personal security stray so far. But the longer the space stayed quiet, the more at ease he felt. Eventually, he even started browsing the artwork on the walls. 

This self-guided tour took him to the far-right end of the building, up two black steps, and into the lounge. In this particularly quiet space, he took a deep breath and set his rifle down on a glossy table by the doorway. Here, he could give himself permission to relax, if just for a moment.

The bar was well-stocked, complete with his favorite gin, and he set about crafting himself a cocktail, a skill he hadn’t utilized in a long while, but one that never seemed to rust. He preferred not to start a drink without a toast, even if only one made alone, but as he leaned his back against the marble bar and stared up at the shelves of brilliant liquor bottles on the back wall, his mind went blank. He and his men had scrambled to prepare for Jeremiah’s Valeska’s great act of destruction without knowing exactly what it would be, and they had survived. They’d already claimed an impressive stake in the lower east side, and the odds for coming out on top of this disaster were promising. And yet there seemed so little to celebrate. 

He sighed and lifted his glass just an inch to his mother’s memory.

The drink went down cool and soothing, helping to heal over the wound that was always opened at the thought of her. And as soon as it was bearable, a fresh one opened for his father. This took only half a fresh glass to wash down. 

And then surfaced Butch, one of the hardest sacrifices he’d had to make in the name of justice. Another few swallows.

Victor Zsasz flickered through his head with deep burn of betrayal. A single sip would do.

But beneath it all was an ache that no anesthetic would mask. And he had tried plenty.

It did no good to dwell, though, so he pulled the fullest bottles from the upper shelves and set them on the bar, hunting for something in which to carry them on his way back to the convoy. 

As Oswald searched under the bar, something moved at the edge of his vision, out in the lobby. He dropped to his knees, squeezing his eyes closed to fight off the wave of dizziness such quick movement elicited, then reached for the pistol hidden under his suit jacket. But as he peeked over the bar, his let go of the gun and pushed himself back up. This caught the attention of the man shuffling through the lobby.

He was unkempt, clearly in need of a shower and fresh clothes, mainly as he had bled through the entire left side of his shirt. He was ghostly pale, skin shining with old sweat. He was tall, a thin man on a large frame, but he was far from threatening.

“You look like you’ve seen better days, friend,” Oswald called out, deciding to overtly announce his presence rather than risk catching him by surprise. Even a bleeding man could be armed.

The man flinched, then looked in through the lounge’s open door. His eyes narrowed as he peered at Oswald, the task seeming difficult. 

Catching a glint of frightened instability in the man’s large, blood-shot eyes, Oswald spoke again. “I mean you no harm.”

The eyes blinked a few times, then fell, landing at the table nearest the door before they hit the floor. They returned to the table, calculating how quickly he could reach the gun lying atop it.

“No. Don’t. I said—” Oswald barked to no avail. He scrambled, knocking the glass off the bar as he pulled himself around its corner, but even as it clearly pained him to do so, the man used his terribly long stride to reach the gun and lift it with his right hand. He struggled to aim with only one usable arm, but for this, Oswald was not interested in criticizing him.

“I said ‘I mean you no harm,’” Oswald repeated, freezing in place, now exposed in front of the bar. He knew he could not reach for his pistol, but he also knew he would not be volunteering to put his hands up in surrender to this disaster of a man.

“I heard you,” he growled, voice thick with the phlegm of disuse. “Everyone means us harm.”

“I can see why you might think that,” Oswald replied, looking pointedly at his left shoulder. He spoke slowly, giving the wheels in his head time to turn, to work their magic and form a plan to escape the wrong end of his own rifle. “I believe I could help you. What’s your name?”

The man shook his head, breathing hard through his nose.

“Mine is Oswald.”

“I know.”

Oswald couldn’t help but lower his eyes and smile. 

“Then you know I have the power to help. All you have to do is lower my gun. You can keep it; just stop pointing it at me.”

The man took three pained breaths, then let the heavy rifle drift downward, coming to rest against his thigh. Oswald blinked, patiently waiting for his moment of inspiration. _Any second now._

“Why would you help me?”

_So you don__’t shoot me, you fool._ “I can’t help it. I’ve always been a man of the people. Looks like you need a doctor. I have one or two back at my base.”

He shook his head. Oswald raised his eyebrows, wondering what else he could possibly want.

“I need to find my friend. He’s supposed to be back by now. He left a note while I was asleep…”

This is when it struck: a moment of such brilliant clarity that Oswald couldn’t stop his lips from stretching into a smile. He’d come face-to-face with this man once before at the Iceberg, though he’d easily slipped Oswald’s memory since it had been his friend that had done all the talking. The friend who Oswald thought he’d recognized.

“Wait,” he said, raising his open hand as he crafted his story at lightning speed. “Your friend. He’s on his way to City Hall. We came across him about a block east of here, and he said _he_ needed a doctor. That must have been for you. He didn’t mention you, but I can understand why he wouldn’t want to give away…well, I can understand his discretion.”

The man said nothing, face stoic but clearly calculating the likelihood of Oswald’s story. He was not buying it. Yet. 

“About, what, six foot? Dark hair. Clean cut. Glasses.”

The man’s face softened. Oswald thought back to the last night before the bridges fell, clawing for another memory about the man, a name, an accent, any quirk that could identify him without giving away his own game. 

“Talks too much,” he added, letting half of his smile fall. 

Finally, the man nodded, swallowing hard. “That’s him.”

Oswald mirrored his nod. “We’re headed back soon. Why don’t you come with us, and save him and our doctors a trip back here?”

The man drew a shaky inhalation, sizing Oswald up one more time before furrowing his brow. “I’m Rhett.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Rhett.”

They watched each other for a moment until Rhett couldn’t hide his pain anymore. He slumped into the nearest chair and leaned on the tabletop to catch his breath. Oswald watched his right hand. It never loosened its grip on his gun.

“Sorry for…this,” Rhett muttered, nodding toward the weapon. Oswald flashed a smile and shook his head.

“I can hardly blame you. Can’t be too careful. As I said, if you still need it once you’re healed up, you can take it. I have plenty.” 

He was glad to see that Rhett seemed to understand the implication, but Oswald wasn’t in the clear yet. He still felt compelled toward compassion. It was a rare impulse likely attributed to his handful of toasts, but he didn’t mind indulging it a while longer.

“Can I make you a drink before we depart? Something to take the edge off? It might help with traveling.”

Rhett thought for a second, then nodded quietly. Oswald made his way back to the bar, cautiously stepping over his broken glass and momentarily considering the opportunity to reach for his pistol, but opting for honesty instead.

“You strike me as a bourbon man.”

He nodded again, then shivered.

“Blood loss is likely making you cold. This will warm you up.” Oswald found a snifter and poured a neat drink. His uneven gait made it dance in the glass before he could set it down at Rhett’s elbow. 

“Thanks,” Rhett said reluctantly. 

“My pleasure. Take a moment to savor this, and we’ll get on the road. I’m sure your friend will be eager to reunite with you.”

Rhett took a slow drink, closing his eyes to swallow, and then set the glass down. “I don’t know how to pay. I have a little money, but I don’t know how to access it. I get the sense that your doctors aren’t taking insurance.”

Oswald was genuinely amused, and he allowed himself to laugh. “I’m afraid not. Never you mind payment. We can figure all that out later. Maybe you can help someone else who needs it once you’re back in working order.”

As Rhett took another wary sip, Oswald watched his thick eyebrows knit together, the brain behind them no doubt wondering just what he might be agreeing to. 

“He might already be on his way back,” Rhett said, mostly to his drink. Oswald frowned.

“Perhaps. Though that does seem unlikely. The crew that picked him up is probably just arriving. He’ll still need to find our doctor and explain your situation. I can try to radio and tell them to keep him there, if you’d like.”

The lines in Rhett’s brow deepened as he thought. With another heavy breath, though, his face started to relax, and Oswald pushed his strategy forward. He was not one for letting strangers grow too comfortable in his presence, after all. Best to keep them on their toes.

“I hate to rush you, but my men are packing up. If you’d like to get down to City Hall before your friend leaves again, we’ll have to go now.”

Rhett finally raised his eyes from his barely-touched drink, and looked into Oswald’s face, focusing hard on his sharp features, as if they would tell him the right thing to do. 

* * *

“Gentlemen, please make room for a guest,” Oswald called to the convoy of black trucks and an oversized SUV. Rhett shuffled along beside him, rifle still at his side, though held precariously by weakening fingers. He had tried to look alert as they made their way back to the vehicles, but Oswald could clearly tell he was fading fast.

They approached the SUV, and Oswald waited for someone to open the door for him. When no one stepped up, he sighed, rolled his eyes, and pulled it open himself, only to find the back seat already occupied by several loaded duffel bags and one of the newest members of his gang.

“We need this space.”

The young man looked around, searching for someone to back him up should he defend his position. Then he looked up at Rhett. Rhett stared back.

Oswald’s head jutted forward as he clarified his order: “Get. Out.”

“There’s no room anymore. Just the seat up front, for you. I mean, we don’t even know this guy, boss,” the dark-clad man protested. The bandanna over his mouth puffed out as he sighed in exasperation.

Oswald blinked, just once. “You know, why don’t you take the front, and we’ll just make do back here.”

“Are…are you sure, boss?” he asked, sliding out onto the street cautiously. Oswald nodded and directed him toward the back of the vehicle to make room for Rhett, who crawled as carefully as possible into the seat, wincing and holding his breath as he situated himself into the least uncomfortable position he could muster, twisting his torso away from the bags piled in the seat next to him. Oswald smiled at him and closed the door gingerly, allowing him to rest his head on its window. He stared ahead, locking his gaze on the headrest of the passenger seat, swallowing when he saw Oswald climb into it, his lackey nowhere to be seen. It seemed possible that Oswald was cleaning a knife, but from his place in the back seat, Rhett couldn’t be sure, and he didn’t have it in him to turn around and look for the man who had clearly _not_ earned a place up front. He watched Oswald slide on a pair of circular sunglasses, and as the SUV began to move, he closed his eyes, giving up on the feeling in his gut that had warned him against letting down his guard. 

A car door slammed closed and startled him back into consciousness, but before he could muster the strength to raise himself off his own door, it swung open. He tried to sit upright, but he couldn’t find his balance quickly enough to avoid stumbling out into a small body, firm hands scrabbling for purchase somewhere that wouldn’t hurt him and landing on either side of his ribs, supporting him for the second it took to get his feet back under himself. 

“Oh, my,” Oswald muttered, laughing softly as he backed away, hands still raised to ensure Rhett had his balance. Rhett blinked rapidly, reaching for the stiff shoulders of Oswald’s jacket to steady himself.

“Sorry, sorry,” Rhett muttered, gritting through the burn caused by using his left arm. As he stepped back, he half-expected Oswald to brush the contact off his clothes. But he didn’t. He just gestured toward the stone staircase leading to the front door, and Rhett walked.

It was only once he’d climbed half the steps that he noticed the armed guards standing on either side of the entrance, and he realized far too late that he’d left his new rifle on the floorboard of the SUV.

The guards simultaneously opened the doors for him and the rest of the party that trickled through behind, and when he made eye contact with a small woman in a green jumpsuit standing at attention in the building’s massive foyer, he rushed to approach her.

“I’m looking for my friend,” he said, voice quiet but firm. Before he could start describing Link, her eyes went wide and distant, and her shoulders straightened. As she stood at attention, Oswald approached, visibly amused.

“Please show my friend to the infirmary.”

“Sir?” she asked, daring to look at him just long enough to convey her confusion. He rolled his eyes, which he seemed to do frequently, a single finger pointing to the high ceiling with a little flourish.

“The last office on the right, where the doctors have set up.”

“Sir.”

She took off for the grand staircase at the end of the lobby so quickly that she had to turn back and gesture for Rhett to follow her. He could barely keep up. At the sound of a throat clearing behind them, she turned around and stiffened her neck again, changing course for the elevator near the entrance.

The elevator chimed and slowly opened, revealing a long hallway of tall office doors. A hospital wheelchair had been parked beside the elevator, and by taking hold of its handles, the woman silently directed Rhett to sit in it. He didn’t care for giving up his ability to move for himself, but his body was desperate for rest, burning up and freezing at the same time, and he sank into the seat without protest. They rolled smoothly down the quiet hall, Rhett wanting to continue the line of questioning he’d not yet been able to start, wanting to pursue a brand new one: “What are you so afraid of?” But he sighed and decided to wait, to focus his attention on talking to a doctor and surviving whatever methods of healing might be in store. 

The farthest office door was propped open, and he could smell a faint blend of disinfectants and astringents from ten feet away. When they finally crossed the threshold, he expected to see operating tables and surgical instruments glittering in the late evening sun. Instead, he was met with two cots and a few rolling carts loaded down with various haphazardly organized medical supplies. 

A head of dark hair popped up from behind one of the overloaded carts, eyes widening from behind thick glasses. 

“A patient?”

“A friend of Mr. Penguin’s,” the woman answered quietly, parking the wheelchair and turning for the door before the doctor could ask any more of her. And the look on his face clearly spoke of further questions.

“Um. Okay, so,” the boyish doctor said, crossing his arms and taking in the sight of Rhett’s shoulder. “This is from…a shotgun?”

Rhett nodded. The doctor nodded, too, and stepped around him, pushing him toward the bed at the corner of the room. “We’re going to lie you down, give you something for the pain, and then get you cleaned up, alright?” 

Another nod.

“I’m going to do all that I can to minimize the pain here, but you’re clearly fighting an infection, so with the inflamed tissue…you know, let’s take it one step at a time.” The brakes set on the wheels, and the doctor helped Rhett to the bed. He lay on top of the rough sheet, breathing heavily through his nose at the irritation of the wound. 

“Any allergies?”

“No.”

“Okay. This will help you relax. You may feel sleepy, since you’re probably worn out. It’s okay to sleep—wait, no head injuries?”

“No.”

“It’s okay to sleep, then, if you want.”

He didn’t particularly want to fall asleep here. He didn’t want any more time to pass than absolutely necessary before setting about finding Link, wherever he was hiding in this massive building. He meant to ask the doctor, but when his lips parted to form the question, a liquid flame filled his veins, forcing his muscles to go slack, and despite willing himself not to, he let his eyes fall closed. 

* * *

Rhett slept heavily, which had not surprised Oswald upon his entrance into the makeshift infirmary. The sun had long set, and he had heavy chemicals in his system keeping him under and helping him to heal. The worried lines in his face had gone smooth with sleep, and he looked years younger, more charmingly disheveled than damaged and deranged. 

Oswald tested the strength of the drugs by dragging a metal chair across the floor, letting its legs scrape in protest for a full two seconds before setting it in place at Rhett’s bedside. The sleep held.

He lowered quietly into the chair. The evening had proven long, full of updates on the activity around town, the carnival of characters who’d decided to stay all settling into their corners and raising walls that begged him to break them down. Between each new question that demanded his attention, his mind wandered up the stairs and down the hall, imagining the progress of his new friend’s surgery, imagining how it must feel to have a bullet pulled from one’s body, wondering if the doctor had bothered with anesthesia at all. The lack of screams coming from the upper floor gave it away, of course; the doctor he’d coerced into joining his base was too gentle, too bound to his Hippocratic oath to leave any real room for doubt. He knew this could be a problem in the days to come, but for now, he appreciated such kindness in his medical staff.

As he rested his chin on his hand in dark room, he realized that he just wanted Rhett treated well. The desire was counterproductive, antithetical to the hardened image he was always trying to cultivate, but he supposed that there was no harm in letting it go unquestioned for just one night. His appearance in the hotel lobby had seemed fortuitous, a little gift from the universe that Oswald could not manage to ignore.

The man had been gutsy, fearless enough at the edge of his own death to hold Oswald’s gun against him. He was fiercely loyal. There was little Oswald appreciated more than that. 

He smiled into his palm as he considered all the ways he might siphon that loyalty off for himself, and just how powerful the results could be. 

He could weaponize Rhett. He’d done it before. 

Or he could just enjoy his company, let himself feel a little less alone as he set about picking off his enemies one by one, claiming what was left of his city once and for all. He wondered what Rhett could bring to the table in such a scenario, and he grinned. 

The possibilities felt limitless. And then they felt familiar. 

He swallowed thickly at the quiet growl of inner demons that licked at his conscience, reminded him that all he had to do was eliminate the competition, turn Rhett into an island. He knew it could be done.

He’d done it before.

“I’ve decided, Rhett,” Oswald said quietly, placing his hand on Rhett’s forearm as he spoke, “that you have ‘fate’ written all over you. I do hope you won’t waste that.” 

He patted his arm once for emphasis, then stood and made his way for the door.


	11. Clean Slate

He was convinced that his sense of hearing had come back first, so he focused what energy he could muster on listening to the space around him. When he could hear nothing but his own breathing, he rubbed his fingers together to listen for the sound of friction. His eyebrows ticked upward when he heard it and realized how quiet the massive room was. And then a monotone beep, faint though it was, caused him to flinch. It sounded again, and he recognized the rhythm/syncopation as that of a heart monitor. And then the vents began humming with circulation. And then something else circulated air, something smaller, more animal. It inhaled and exhaled slowly, peacefully, and before Rhett could bother to open his eyes, it lulled him back to sleep.

Another faint beep registered hours or days later, and this time he forced himself to cling to the sound until he could see where he was. Once his eyelids finally cracked open, he refused to let them close again, squinting out at the room from its furthest corner, where he lay beneath a single thin blanket, body stiff and settled into a flimsy mattress. Movement at the opposite corner of the room caught his attention, and just as his vision cleared, he saw a doctor—or at least, a man in a mostly-white coat— walk out the door and disappear down the hallway.

He stared after him, letting his eyes go fuzzy as his body tried to convince them to close. At some point, the doorway darkened again, giving him something new to focus on. Though at first, his eyes did struggle to comprehend all the edges and angles to the figure slowly approaching him. 

The first feature he could recognize was a smile, so out of instinct, he smiled back. The effort was exhausting; he wondered how long his face had been expressionless with sleep.

And in the voice that came wisping out of that smile, he heard genuine concern. It hit him before the words themselves, and he had to process the language for a moment before answering.

“How are you feeling?” it had asked.

“Fine,” he answered before he could finish taking survey of himself. It didn’t seem like he should be fine, but he couldn’t pinpoint why. As he tried to figure it out, he stared blankly at the face meeting his stare with equally wide eyes. Then they narrowed in recognition, or rather, the lack thereof. 

“Oswald,” the sympathetic grin said, filling a mental gap Rhett hadn’t known existed. Rhett nodded, then smiled sheepishly and shook his head. 

“Sorry.”

Oswald’s brow furrowed, weighing the apology before brushing it away. “No need to apologize. One can forgive a little forgetfulness after what you’ve been through. You’re sure you’re not in pain?”

This time, Rhett took what had felt like Oswald’s permission to truly consider his condition. And surprisingly, the answer went unchanged.

“None,” Rhett answered. 

“All good news, then,” Oswald replied, taking a seat in the wooden chair near the foot of the bed. “You’ve woken up, and you’re not in pain. And our in-house physician proves his prowess.”

“Where…” Rhett started to ask, blinking as he looked again at the high ceiling and fluorescent lighting.

“City Hall. I set my people up here after the attack. It seemed like one of the safest areas, and so far, we’ve done well. When you’re up to it, I’ll give you the tour and set you up with a job. What did you do before all this?”

“I, um…” Rhett held his gaze and cleared his throat to buy himself some time. Something in Oswald’s face made him want to lie, to seem more immediately useful than an entertainer might in a state of emergency. He wanted to make Oswald believe he was worth saving, partly in self-preservation, partly as an attempt to garner favor. “I was a civil engineer.”

Oswald frowned kindly and shook his head.

“Roads, bridges, tunnels, all that.”

The frown faded, and Rhett could nearly hear the engine of Oswald’s brain whirring as it pursued some private thought. He shook himself out of it and reverted back to the practiced smile.

“You must be famished. I’ll get someone to bring you some lunch and give you your privacy.”

Rhett flinched at the thought of being left alone with so many holes in his memory. Oswald noticed. 

“Or…I could stay.”

“I just…” Rhett sighed out a laugh at himself, taking a stab at nonchalance. “I’m having a hard time remembering how I got here.”

Oswald smiled again and leaned back in his chair, crossing his legs and interweaving his fingers over his left knee. “I understand. For what it’s worth, you’re several blocks southeast from where we found you. You had just about bled out, but I’m afraid I don’t know—”

“Where was that?”

Oswald blinked, then shrugged. “A bar. We were looking for supplies in the area.”

With that, Rhett went quiet, trying to piece together his own fragmented memories of riding in the back of an SUV, cleaning out his own wound with tweezers on a bathroom floor, hurling himself through the entrance to a bar. Oswald’s answers hadn’t clarified much, so he opted for letting himself figure it out alone. It was a task that required great patience with himself, and one that wore him out quickly. He closed his eyes to think, then let himself drift in the dark. His shoulder twinged.

“I got shot in an elevator,” he heard himself say. 

“I see,” Oswald replied.

“I was just trying to get out of…wherever it was. Then there were two of them blocking the door, and one of them said…” A laugh bubbled out of him, and he chalked it up to whatever painkillers must be coursing through his veins. His eyes opened slowly and slid to Oswald’s face. “He said to tell ‘Penguin’ hello.”

Oswald’s expression did not change. He simply tilted his head by a few degrees to indicate his surprise.

“Why do you suppose he would say that?”

Rhett laughed again, then winced at the pull of his muscles. “I told them I worked for you.” 

This information caused Oswald’s eyebrows to rise. He shook his head to indicate that he would not be interrupting, so Rhett thought a moment, then finished out what he could of the story.

“I guess I had your name in the back of my head somewhere, and it seemed like a name that could protect me.”

Oswald looked to his own hands, face shadowed with thought. He took a deep breath and leaned forward, one corner of his mouth lifting into a smile as he locked eyes with Rhett.

“It can protect you. It did.”

“Well, I was shot.”

“But not killed. And when all this settles down, and you’re back on your feet, we’ll let them know their message was received, and we’ll respond with one of our own.”

He wasn’t a violent man, necessarily, but the memory of crumpling in the corner of an elevator in blinding pain did make Oswald’s offer seem appealing on some primal level. He shook his head, though he couldn’t be certain he was dismissing the proposition, and let his eyes fall closed again. 

“Thank you,” he said in a newly tired voice. 

“My pleasure.”

Rhett had come in an out of consciousness enough over the next twelve hours to recognize the shifting light coming through the high windows as dusk, night, and dawn, and when he was confident that the sun had fully risen anew, he set himself to work at climbing out of bed. 

He’d expected a much greater challenge than what faced him. He’d prepared for stiffness and pain, a long, agonizing journey from supine to upright. Instead, careful not to put weight on his left arm, he curled upward and let his bare feet touch down on the cold floor. 

A familiar young doctor rushed over from a table across the room and held his hands out to stop Rhett. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Give yourself a second to adjust! If you just hop up, you’ll pass out.”

“I feel surprisingly good. What have you been giving me?”

“Standard fluids, antibiotics, painkillers, anti-inflammatories. You’re healing well. Just take your time, and you can get up. You’ll be glad to know we got every last bit of shot out of your arm. You won’t be carrying around any extra metal.”

Rhett nodded. “I am happy to know that. How long did the surgery take?” 

The doctor scratched his neck and shook his head. “I don’t really remember. I know there was a lot to stitch together, so it was probably four or five hours.”

“That’s all?” Rhett asked, wondering why he’d had such a hard time gaining his bearings when he hadn’t been out of commission for that long. “That’s pretty good.”

“Thanks,” the doctor said quietly. “You were our first major case. Mr. Penguin was pleased with how well it went, too. Though he was a little impatient with how long it took you to wake up. Or at least, get to this point, where you’re ready to get out of bed. But this kind of healing takes time, and there’s just no rushing it.”

“I’m sorry? How long…when was that surgery?”

The doctor chewed his lip as he thought, then answered cautiously, “About three weeks ago.”

He’d been right: Rhett wanted to pass out. He’d been doing something important when he was injured; this much he knew. Now he was weeks away from it, the memory trapped in a shadowed corner of his mind. 

“All that time…that was…me? It took me that long?” he demanded, skepticism edging into his voice. 

The doctor did not respond. His silence needled Rhett. They stared at each other until he found the words. 

“Did you keep me under?”

“It was a delicate situation. I took an oath, you know. But I was ordered to keep you unconscious for—”

“Where is he?”

“Hmm?”

“Tell me.”

The doctor widened his eyes as they tracked the rise of Rhett’s stature. He’d unfolded himself from the bed in a surprisingly fluid movement and stepped into the doctor’s personal space, wordlessly persuading an answer from him.

* * *

In his line of work, Oswald had come to value routines. When he knew exactly who was meant to be where, what activities would result in what retributions, he could keep his fingers on the pulse of his city. The major perk of this was that the second that the pulse flickered, skipped a beat and tried to elude him, he knew where to direct his focus in order to reclaim his reign. One of the more immediate consequences of an orderly base was that he simply slept better. He’d ended most of his evenings the same way since taking over City Hall: hearing the daily production and expense reports from Penn, taking measured sips of herbal teas in the privacy of his own newly-created master suite, meticulously cleaning his teeth, and then soaking in a hot bath until it grew cold, spiking and chilling his own body temperature before dropping into bed. 

And yet only hours later, despite the evening baths, he’d found himself in the spray of his clawfoot tub’s bronze showerhead, the morning sun glinting off the rivulets on his skin. He’d needed it to wake him up, his sleep proving more predictable and less restorative by the night. It was hard to say what, exactly, was interfering with his rest; there were too many potential culprits to consider. But when he couldn’t quite bring his brain on-line in the mornings, the showers helped.

He tried not to consider the possibility that he never felt fully clean anymore. 

Another difficult morning had found him toweling off, plush black terrycloth blotting away the diluted remnants of his redundant ritual. He was exhaling a deep breath into his warm towel when his door was forced open, whining on its hinges until it slammed into the wall. 

With one hand, he pulled the towel tight around his waist; with the other, he scrambled for the pistol resting on top of the nearby bureau. He had already aimed and pulled back its hammer before he registered the figure that had burst into the room. The wild eyes staring him down did not encourage him to lower his weapon.

A timid voice chirped out from the hallway as a wisp of a woman rushed in covering her eyes with her hand.

“Excuse me!” Oswald shouted at her, instead of addressing his guest.

“I’m so sorry, sir, but he just…I couldn’t catch up with him, and Curtis had just stepped away—”

“From his job? He just stepped away from the door that is his job to protect? He just left?”

“Sir, he’s in the—”

“I don’t give—no, we’re not having this conversation right now. Get out!”

“Should I call the guards from downstairs?” she asked, backing away toward the doorway. 

“Seems a bit late for that, don’t you think?” he sniped, causing her to wince.

“Yes, sir.” She turned for the hallway.

“The DOOR, Anita!” he barked. Once the door’s heavy latch had clicked closed, he exhaled and shook his head. 

“You held me under. You were having me drugged. It’s been almost a month.” Rhett’s accusation ricocheted off the marble wall behind Oswald. 

“I’m happy to discuss this once I’m fully clothed. You shouldn’t have been able to enter this—”

“Why didn’t you let me wake up?” Rhett asked. Oswald thought he heard a subtle crack in his voice.

“I’m happy to discuss this further once I’m dressed.”

Rhett did not move. Oswald sighed and lowered his gun. This didn’t seem to affect Rhett; he was frozen just feet from the door, gaze now drifting over Oswald’s head, distant and desperate to hide what looked like the beginnings of panic. His bottom lip quivered just once before he caught it in his teeth. Oswald placed the gun back in its place on the dresser, and the soft clatter of metal on wood pulled Rhett from his momentary daze. He met Oswald’s eyes again, and shook his head.

“I just…I can’t feel my arm.”

The admission presented itself like a gift. 

“Yes,” Oswald said. “I know. That’s why we wanted to give you more time to… I heard there was a chance for a full recovery if you were given adequate rest. You were nearing sepsis.”

Rhett stumbled backward until his back hit the door, a wave of exhaustion-tinged shock washing over him. Oswald rolled his eyes and tightened the towel around his waist, grabbing what clothes he could from the bureau and limping behind the black and white dressing screen, wildly grateful for its recent addition to the suite. He was also grateful for Rhett’s revelation as it offered a distraction from the fact that he’d been caught in such a state of vulnerability. Oswald had spent his entire adult life cultivating a sharp and threatening reputation. Blows like this did not go unanswered. 

“I just hope you haven’t done any permanent damage with this outburst. You’re not bleeding on my floor, are you?”

Rhett’s response was dry and hollow. “What am I doing here?”

Oswald took a long look in the mirror, wishing he’d grabbed the wax for his hair. He ran his fingers through it and shook his head, irritated not by the fact that he would have to wrest control of this situation from a lost and deluded shotgun victim, but that he would have to do it without any shoes on. Something about his tailored suit pants ending at black socks just didn’t strike him as an image of authority. Still, he made his way back around the screen, grabbing a pewter cane that had been resting at the corner of the bureau. He wanted it for the comfort and balance it provided, and he wanted it for a less obvious weapon, should the need arise.

“I’m going to tell you this story one more time. If you can’t remember it after this, then I’m just going to have to consider you a lost cause and send you on your way, my friend.” He smiled, but the expression never quite made its way into his voice. He held the cane in front of him and crossed his wrists atop it, bending at the waist to look down at Rhett. “You, like the rest of us, have been cut off from the world by a deranged psychopath’s attack on every bridge out of the city. You were living downtown after the attack, I suppose. I don’t know. We found you in a bar, arm hanging on by a grotesquely infected thread, and we brought you back here. Cleaned you out, sewed you up, and here you are, good as— well, doing much better. Lots of people out there would love to be in your position. You’re one of the lucky ones.”

“Why did you help me?”

Oswald laughed dryly. “You didn’t give me much of a choice: I had a gun to my head. That’s not figurative.” 

As Rhett’s brow furrowed, Oswald’s eyes widened with mock disbelief before he smiled the expression away. 

“I know. That must seem like a stretch from where you’re sitting now, but it’s true. I liked your gumption, and I didn’t want to die, not when things were just getting interesting around here. I suppose gratitude was too much to expect in times like these.”

He let the opportunity for a thank-you float between them. Rhett did not take it, and this thrilled Oswald. The defiance gave him a more enjoyable buzz than any grace could have offered. 

“How did you get stuck? It seems like you could easily arrange a way out for yourself.”

Oswald lowered his eyes and grinned. “I’m not stuck. I chose to stay. This is my city.”

Rhett chuckled heartlessly. “I’m loyal to my town, too, but—”

“You misunderstand,” Oswald interrupted, locking eyes as he made his correction. “It’s not some overblown sense of hometown pride. This is my city. I own it.”

When Rhett responded with nothing more than a silent stare, Oswald let his face soften and extended his left hand to help him up. “And I’m feeling generous, so you get to stay. Looks like you threatened the right man,” he said, gritting his teeth as Rhett pulled himself up. Oswald turned him toward the door and placed his hand on Rhett’s back. As he pulled the door open and gently guided Rhett into the hallway, he added, “Do it again and I’ll put you in the ground. Good talk.”

Penn was waiting just beyond the doorway, and he rushed over to take charge of their newest addition, leading Rhett away from Oswald’s suite and back toward the central staircase. 

Oswald crossed to the foot of his bed and dropped down heavily onto its duvet, chin falling into his palm as his elbow rested on his knee. Rhett had mentioned no third party, and for this, he congratulated himself. 

  
  


* * *

For the next several days, Rhett wandered City Hall in a partial haze, newly fitted with a lightweight black armor that made him look tougher than he felt. From the cover of his shoulder padding, it was less obvious that he wasn’t using his right arm as he helped out where he could, joining watches and patrols, always staying a few steps behind his partners, the ones who were armed to the teeth and appeared a bit too eager to defend their turf with lethal force. There were no challenges to their territory, though, so the patrols felt more like leisurely strolls than meaningful security details. 

He struggled to make conversation, unsure of how to approach the hardened faces breezing past him without bothering to introduce themselves. Those working inside were often so focused on their tasks—moving furniture, checking supply reserves, polishing any surface with the potential for shine— that they did not look up, even when someone as noticeable as he walked by. The doctor found him early each afternoon and ordered him to take a break (from what, he wasn’t sure), and with each bout of restless sleep in the makeshift barracks, he anticipated waking up with some answers, with more clarity than he’d had before. It never happened. He just woke up hungry. On the fifth day, while trying to hunt down something to quell the rumbling in his stomach, he realized the scarcity of their food. 

“You’re supporting dozens of people here, almost fifty, right? I’ve been in the kitchen, and the storeroom…” Rhett told Mr. Penn, the busiest body in the place, with easily the most worried face. He was closest to top, though, and had Cobblepot’s ear several times a day.

“Yes, I know,” Penn replied, looking through the pages attached to an old clipboard as if they might provide some relief from his anxiety. “Our food scavenging teams are coming back a bit short. Not to worry. Rumor has it that some of our neighbors have acquired a healthy surplus, so we’ll surely be negotiating a trade of some sort.”

“Neighbors?” Rhett asked. Penn swallowed and nodded, clearly wanting to step away from this conversation and back to whatever had kept him busy before. 

“A group of ruffians has claimed a few blocks to the west of us. They may be trading with a group to the northwest, the Sirens, for food. We don’t have much to offer for trading, I’m afraid.”

“We didn’t, Mr. Penn, but we do now.”

Both men turned toward the grand staircase and found Oswald descending with a black cane in one hand and a folded map in the other. He held Rhett’s gaze for several steps, then dropped it to speak to Penn.

“We embracing a new enterprise, effective immediately.” When he reached the main level, he pressed the map into Penn’s chest, letting his assistant juggle his own papers as he tried to open it. “We’re sitting on top of the old munitions factory. It’s only a few blocks east,” he explained, mouth dropping open in an ecstatic smile. He laughed, and Rhett felt a surprising pull to do the same. He suppressed his own grin, but he couldn’t deny that he was entertained just by watching Oswald control a room. 

“You’re taking a team down there tonight to see what it will take to get it up and running. I have a great feeling about this,” he added, patting Penn on the shoulder.

“Me? Sir, I don’t know anything about—”

“Not yet, you don’t. But you do know how to be flexible, and you’ll have a couple mechanics with you helping you figure it out.”

Rhett watched Penn wipe his brow and study the map with a fresh wave of anxiety. “I could help, too. I’ve been on security patrols; I can keep watch out there.”

This time, when Oswald’s eyes landed on him, he felt their attention rove the full length of his body before he heard an answer. 

“No. I have other plans for you. Penn, get your group together. I want an equipment list with the morning report.”

Penn nodded and shuffled away, leaving Rhett alone with Oswald, who he was only now realizing he hadn’t seen in a couple days. In keeping himself busy, he thought he’d been actively avoiding the man, but at this proximity, he found himself entertained by the domineering presence.

Oswald led him toward a door just off the main corridor, and when he pushed it open, he swept his arm through the air in presentation. “This is yours.”

Rhett walked into the office, a cozy post-modern space cleaned of all remnants of its former owner. On the desk lay a stack of blueprints. He sat in the gray office chair and studied the prints for a moment before the latch of the door made him look up. Oswald leaned casually against the door.

“You’re going to be working on a special project, and you’re going to need your privacy.” 

“Is this…these are this building,” Rhett noted, looking back to the prints.

“That’s right.”

“And you want…is this like a panic room?”

Oswald’s eyes narrowed for a moment before he answered. “Yes. A panic room. Also a vault, somewhere safe to keep our ammunition, our food when we finally get it, whatever valuables we might accumulate as we continue to grow. But I don’t want anyone knowing about this. I don’t want the more desperate among us—or the less honest— to be tempted. It’s best for everyone if you just go about this on your own. When you’re ready to get underway with construction, I will arrange a crew. In the meantime, I ask for your discretion. In fact, if anyone gets a little too curious about what you’re doing in here,” he said, pulling a small pistol from inside his suit jacket and placing it atop the blueprints, “I demand it.”

Rhett let the gun sit between them, nodding slowly at the undertaking he was facing. He knew how Mr. Penn felt: asked to do something barely within his expertise, given no option but to succeed. And yet he was simultaneously grateful that he wouldn’t have to wander the grounds looking for ways to stay busy. 

“Looks like you won’t have to keep wearing that armor,” Oswald said as he pulled open the door. Just before it closed behind him, he glanced backward at Rhett and added, “Not that I mind it.”

Rhett exhaled, ran his hand through his hair, and so that he could better see his work, moved the pistol to the right-hand drawer. 


	12. Alone Together

The tension seemed to hang between them for ages, Link’s gaze unwavering in its fixation on Ed’s body as it paced from one side of the studio apartment to the other. He was visibly working out a problem, face contorting in new expressions of concentration with each pivot. By the time he finally froze at the end of the bed, Link flinched.

“I don’t know what’s happened to me.”

Link nodded as if Edward did not sound crazy. 

“I remember so much of my past, but I don’t know what I don’t know.”

At this, Link started to fear that he was overacting his attempt at an even expression.

“I mean, I don’t know how much of my memory I’m missing.”

“Maybe you remember someone dying in this bed?” Link suggested, angling his head. “Maybe you could start there? Maybe with how that death happened?”

Ed ignored him. “How do I get back what I don’t know is gone? I don’t remember getting this wound, but how much before that am I missing? How much after?”

“We could work our way up to the last point you remember, starting with the time someone apparently died here with you,” Link offered, starting to droop from the chemicals still working through his system. 

Ed crossed his arms and stroked his chin. “I’d rather not revisit that memory.”

“Great,” Link sighed, throwing his hands up and letting himself sink back against the headboard. He found it surprisingly easy to let go of his worried interest, and as soon as he did so, his eyelids grew heavy again.

“Most concerning, though, is that I keep losing pieces of my day. I wake up in the middle of the afternoon without knowing I’d fallen asleep.”

“You’re getting sleep? Lucky…” Link whined as he let his head roll onto a pillow. Edward sighed audibly.

“Fine. Yes. Go to sleep,” he conceded. He’d barely finished the phrase before Link was out. 

He woke once before the sun had risen, jolting with surprise when he realized he wasn’t in the hotel room. He propped himself up and looked around, though, and soon recognized both the small apartment and the man sleeping on an old chaise near a bookcase. There was little menacing about him in the hazy darkness, and Link was still terribly tired, so he let himself sleep for another few hours. 

Gray morning light had seeped in through the industrial windows in the kitchen, and as Link looked toward it, he found Ed lying on the floor asleep, hand gently draped over his injury. He’d removed the suit shirt and jacket, the emerald pants now paired with only black socks and a white sleeveless undershirt. 

Link lay back on the pillow, eyes fixed on the industrial ductwork running the length of the ceiling as he considered whether to get himself out of bed. He’d have denied it if asked, but he found the alternative a bit alluring: letting his mind walk back to the park, to the sensation of Rhett’s voice slipping down his neck, keeping him warm in the frigid woods by starting a small fire deep in his stomach. 

Edward cleared his throat as he started to wake, and Link blinked away the daze that had spread through him. 

“I have to get to the safe zone,” he said preemptively, a bit too loudly. From the corner of his eye, he saw Ed run a hand over his face, raising up on an elbow to survey the apartment. He nodded to himself, confirming some unspoken suspicion, and then seemed to consider Link’s announcement. His answer was a wordless shake of his head.

Link rolled his eyes. “I can’t get a read on you. First, you said you thought you were headed to the station, and now you’re saying ‘no.’ Did you suddenly remember you have bad blood with the police or something? Too many unpaid parking tickets? Something to do with somebody dying here…” he trailed, sitting up in the bed and pressing the heel of his hand to his temple at the flash of a headache that followed. “I’m sure they’re too busy to worry about whatever’s got you so spooked.” 

“You were in the woods, in the park,” Ed eventually said, carefully pushing up and reaching for his glasses from the corner of the kitchen table. He slid them on and nodded. “I remember.”

Link’s shoulders fell as he realized Ed had only been trying to recognize him. 

“And those are my pants,” Link replied dryly, pointing at Ed’s legs. Ed nodded at this, too.

“I know. I remember taking them from the hotel room. That’s good. This is good. Notable progress.”

“You’re welcome,” said Link, standing up and stretching his arms over his head before putting on his own glasses. He ran a hand through his hair twice, doing what he could to make it feel presentable, then rolled his head to stretch his neck.

“Well, you’re welcome, too.”

Link gave a curt grin. “Why didn’t you just stay in the hotel?”

Ed slowly made his way to his feet before shuffling toward the mostly-bare cabinets to search for some kind of breakfast. 

“I don’t like being in debt. People have a tendency of showing up to collect in the worst ways, so I try not to owe anything to anyone. Now I don’t owe you.”

“Right. I saved your life, and you saved mine. But you also got my suit.”

“And you,” Edward replied just before turning and tossing a rock-hard granola bar across the room to Link, “got breakfast.” He opened an old wrapper of his own and used his molars to bite into the aged bar. “Looks better on me, anyway.”

“Doubt it. It was tailored for—”

“It’s always been my color.”

“Oh, _that_ you remember?”

“_That_ I remember.”

Link sat in the chair near the piano to eat his sad breakfast, and once all three bites were swallowed, he sighed, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. He caught the motion of his reflection in a small mirrored tin that had collected some dust on an end table near the bed. As rough as he felt, he was glad the reflection was too small to make out. 

“Okay. I appreciate the help, the bed, all of it. But I’m going to the safe zone to find my friend. Can you at least point me in the direction of the police department? I have no idea where I am.”

Ed took a long look out his window, then resettled his gaze on Link. “Southern Diamond District, a few blocks from Old Town.”

Link shook his head. “That means nothing to me.”

Ed’s eyes narrowed. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”

“I’m nobody. I was just here for work the week before the bridges came down. We’re from LA, man, and now he’s out there on his own, with the whole place falling to shit—”

Two hands raised in front of him, drawing him back from the ledge toward which his mind was careening. He hadn’t even noticed Ed stand up, but suddenly, he was right in front of him, face showing something like concern. Link fell quiet and took a deep breath, closing his eyes to let himself calm down. When he opened them again, his tone leveled out. “Can you just write it down or something? Just tell me how to get there, or how to get to the area. Something.”

Ed breathed deeply and glanced at the window behind him before making up his mind. “Okay. I’ll get you to the GCPD. I’ll come with you—”

“You don’t have to—”

“No, I do. Just let me stick with you until I figure out what happened to me, where I’m supposed to be. This is the first morning I’ve been able to piece anything together from the day before, at least this quickly, and maybe it has something to do with you. Or at least with having another person around to help jog my memory.”

Link stood, taking a deep, thoughtful breath before he replied. He grimaced as he exhaled, breath dry and sour from a long, restless night. “Yes, you can come with me, and once we find Rhett, we’ll try to get you some help, too.” As he spoke, his eyes wandered back to the reflective tin, and he arched an eyebrow. “I’m taking your mints, though. Then we’re even.”

Three hours later, Link was peering into the windows of a darkened corner cafe. He’d been stopping at the windows of nearly every business they’d passed, slowing them down enough for Ed to hand over the lead, following behind Link’s erratic pace by quietly calling out directions at the intersections of each new block. Ed watched the streets and, trusting that Link would alert them to any threats lurking behind closed doors, felt himself relax. He walked his city’s streets coolly, comfortably alert. It took little thought for him to navigate the borough, even on the streets he did not recognize. The pavement radiated a sense of direction through the soles of his scuffed oxfords that it did not grant visitors; hence, he figured, Link’s dizzying pace. He’d grown tired of stopping and waiting for Link to glimpse into every window he could access, so Ed slowed his gait and kept Link in his periphery. 

“You must have a good relationship with this coworker to go through all this.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Link asked, scanning an alley as they passed by. “He’s the only person I know here.”

“Well, not anymore, right?” Ed replied, a twinge of anxiety flitting through his otherwise cool demeanor. Something in him wanted Link to like him. For the moment, he attributed to a sense of self-preservation.

“I don’t think I know you. You don’t even know you.”

The verbal jab deflected off of him, sparking a dark laugh. “Good point. I can’t wait to find out who I am!” 

The fact that he could manage such a light tone made Link furrow his brow. In context, Ed considered, the retort may have made him seem a bit unbalanced.

“Left at the next street,” he announced, careful to keep an even voice. “How long have you worked together?” he asked, trying to keep the conversation in the air. Link glanced back at him, then looked forward again before answering.

“A while. We run a business together, so I can’t exactly go leaving him here.”

“Without the bridge and ferries, you can’t go leaving regardless.”

“Thanks.”

“But hey, worse comes to worse, you don’t have to split your profits anymore, right?” Ed tried, another stab at humor that missed its mark.

“Wouldn’t work like that. None of it works without him.”

Ed grew quiet, flipping through the empty files in his head for some source of empathy. He had to have known a similar feeling at least once in his life, a rich connection to someone else that he would protect even by trekking a dangerous city with a virtual stranger. There must have been someone he’d been able to depend on, someone who would be worth seeking out in times like these.

Nobody came to mind.

“We’re only a few blocks out. Keep an eye out for patrolmen. They might be able to get us there quicker,” Ed told Link when he caught sight of a familiar street sign. Link only nodded and kept moving, slinking from storefront to storefront until a voice called out through bullhorn. 

“Stop right there. You’re on GCPD grounds. Are you looking for shelter?”

“Yes. And I’m looking for a missing person,” Link shouted back. Ed found the source of the new voice in a makeshift barrier constructed at the next intersection. At the top right corner, a fully militarized officer scoped them out from an elevated guard’s post.

“Are you armed?”

Link faltered, only just recognizing that the gun he’d taken from Ed during their first meeting was no longer on his person. He glanced backward and found Ed shaking his head subtly. 

“No,” Link called back. “We’re not armed. We’re just looking for help. He worked for the department,” he added, nodding back to Ed in a final attempt to earn passage. Ed bristled at the reference, though he wasn’t sure why.

The seconds that followed were loaded with a tense silence. A sense of anticipation had trickled down Ed’s spine, a warning from some more primal part of his brain.

“We have a fully armed unit guarding this entrance, so don’t be alarmed when you see rifles pointed at you as you come through the gate. It’s just a precaution. I’m going to go down and open it; you can approach.”

Link moved forward; Ed cocked an eyebrow. Something about the silence in the area made him want to call a bluff. He supposed it didn’t matter: the heavy wood and metal gate was unlocking and sliding open using what limited manpower it had, and without a moment’s hesitation, Link was walking through it.

“Right there is good. Put your hands up for a moment, please.” 

Link did as he was asked, stopping only a few feet into the gated region, looking for the promised officers, the guns that were supposed to be aimed at him, keeping him in line. Wherever they were, they were well hidden.

The officer frisked Link quickly, finding nothing threatening about him. “Okay, you can relax. Thanks for understanding our precautions. There’s no shortage of people who want to raise hell around here, as if things weren’t bad enough. Now, who worked for us? We could certainly use some more support…”

When Ed didn’t answer, Link turned to look at him, only to find himself alone. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised, though a sense of concern for the man’s wellbeing did flit through his mind. He laughed it off and shrugged as he faced the officer. 

“I don’t know what happened to him. He was just here, but I guess he didn’t want to come in.”

“Well, we’ll keep an eye out. Next block up is the department. There’s not much in the way of order up there, so be patient. We’re doing our best.”

“Thanks,” Link answered, making his way toward the headquarters alone, his heart rising in this throat a little more with each step toward the old building’s main entrance, until he was finally reaching for the brass door handle to enter the refuge.

The door swung open in his face, forcing him backward as an old man, dirty and hardened by circumstances worse than Link had survived, fell out of it, losing his balance and rolling down the concrete stairs toward the street. A middle-aged man followed out of the building, shouting down at the fallen heap on the sidewalk. Link sidestepped the altercation and slipped through the door behind him, barely hearing the idle threats shouted in his wake: “You better not show your face around here again, you piece of shit. Stealing rations from kids? Really, Davis? Jesus. You’re on your own.” 

The guard was right: the department was in chaos, the bullpen floor crowded with tense and frustrated civilians while a handful of uniformed officers darted to and fro, faces hard and exhausted. He found a quiet group of refugees huddled near an office door and smiled hopefully as he approached. A thin woman clutching a paper cup of water looked up at him, and the old faces around her followed suit.

“Excuse me, is there a medical station around here? Some kind of infirmary on site? I’m looking for an injured man. Gunshot to the shoulder.”

“They’re trying. They’re doing the best they can.”

He nodded, eyes plastered open as he urged her on, but she took her time delivering the information, traces of shell shock pervading her slow speech.

“I hope you find him. Down the south hall, there’s a few beds. Otherwise, it’s the hospital down the street, and that place is…it’s a ghost town around there.”

She was still mumbling long after he thanked her and took off for the hallway, skimming officers’ faces for eye contact and finding none. They seemed to look through him as they went about their hurried business, each vying to put out unimaginable fires. 

The south hallway was a stark contrast: it was quiet and still, the air only disturbed by the bodies quietly writhing on the cots lined head to toe along both walls. Most were sleeping or staring unseeingly at the ceiling, but some were actively fighting their pain, not yet resigned to fates Link had no trouble predicting. 

He walked the hall quickly, eyes roving from face to face. His heart thrummed as he moved closer to the end of the building, and by the time he reached the last cot, he was gritting his teeth and shaking his head. He bent next to a quiet man whose leg was splinted with two boards and several rags. 

“Sorry to bother you, but you haven’t seen—”

“I haven’t. Whoever you’re looking for, I haven’t seen them. If they’re important enough, maybe Gordon will help you. I doubt it, though. Otherwise, forget it. You’re better off outside.”

Link recoiled and stood, muttering a heartless thank-you as he made his way back toward the bullpen. Adrenaline had him on edge, and he balled his fists as he tried to control his anger. But when he finally caught the eye of a young lieutenant, he couldn’t stop himself from jumping in her path and forcing her to acknowledge him.

“Who do I talk to about a missing person?” Link asked directly, voice clear and loud over the din of the wild building. 

She stepped back and sighed heavily, looking first at the floor, and then straight into his face with a coldness that still managed to catch him off guard, even now, even here. 

“It goes against my oath as a public servant to say this, but we just can’t take that on right now. Look around. We don’t have the resources. We’re barely keeping our heads above water here.”

Link was shaking his head before the words even found his mouth. “No. No, I don’t accept that. He’s seriously hurt. I crossed half this city to get here to find him, and I some need help. You have to—”

“We can’t. Maybe in a week or so, but right now, we’re trying to care for everyone here. Please try to understand.”

“Who is Gordon?”

“The captain? He’s busy. And he’d tell you the same thing, anyway. Excuse me.” 

His voice flew out of him with such force that it hurt his throat. “What am I supposed to do? I don’t know where to look. We’re not from here. We don’t know this city. I don’t know where to go! You’re supposed to help me!”

She whipped around and grabbed his bicep, dragging him to a nearby desk and planting him in a wooden chair at its side. She dug through a drawer and pulled out several folded paper maps, each starting to yellow at its corners, and spread one out over the desk, orienting it to him with her left hand as her right uncapped a red marker.

“You’re here,” she barked, marking the police department’s block with an X. “Do you know where you came from?”

“Our hotel was just southeast of Robinson Park.”

“Okay, so here,” she said, marking the area with an ‘H.’ “When did you lose sight of him?”

“Yesterday afternoon. Around three?”

She frowned as she thought. “Have you been anywhere else? Anywhere that could help you get your bearings?”

“What?” he replied reflexively, wishing he’d paid more attention to the street signs around Edward’s apartment. He shook his head. “I was somewhere a few blocks from Old Town.”

“In what direction?”

Link shook his head, embarrassed that he couldn’t answer.

“Okay,” she replied, drawing out the word as she marked Old Town on the map. “That’s too bad. I wish I had more to offer, but looks like this is it.”

“He’s tall, has a beard, got shot in the shoulder not long after—”

“I’m not hiding anything from you, sir. If he wasn’t in that hallway and he isn’t already in the morgue, he isn’t here.”

He mirrored her frown, his stomach roiling at the mention of a morgue.

“For what it’s worth, we haven’t taken anyone down in a couple days, so if you saw him yesterday, he probably ain’t there.” At the sight of Link’s distant gaze, she shook her head and pushed a stray hair from her face. “Listen to me: I absolutely do not recommend going out there alone. We don’t know the exact situation outside of our green zone, other than it’s a fucking mess. I’m not going to keep you here, and I won’t send anyone with you, so the best I can do is this,” she said, folding the map quickly and sliding it toward him. Before he grabbed it, she slammed down a can of pepper spray.

“If you find him, you’re welcome to come back and we’ll do what we can to help him out. ‘Til then,” she said, shrugging as her hand pulled away from the desk. Link nodded and stood, reaching for the supplies, tucking the map into his back pocket, and swallowing hard. 

With the realization that he was officially alone, the noise of the department faded into the background, his head going quiet as he made his way toward the main entrance, eyes unblinking as they looked through the bodies crossing in front of him. His fingers held loosely to the canister that offered him no comfort at all. The heavy door fell closed behind him before he even registered his arm yanking it open, and with that, he was back at the beginning, starting from an unfamiliar ground a search that made no sense at all. 

He had come from the east, so he headed west, perhaps in an effort to cover new ground, perhaps in a subconscious attempt to drag his body back to the coast he called home.

Only a block had been put between him and the police headquarters before a whistle snapped him out of his daze. He stopped walking and tightened his grip on the pepper spray, suppressing an ill-natured laugh at the fact that he might come to rely on it so quickly.

“They didn’t have what you wanted, huh?” a phlegm-crackled voice asked from behind.

Link turned slowly to find the man who’d been forcefully removed from the GCPD now leering at him, squinting as the sun struck his small eyes. 

“I’m fine. I got what I needed. But I can’t help you,” Link answered, straightening his neck to add some height to his frame. 

“Don’t be so sure, friend. You got quite a pack on your shoulders. Maybe there’s something in there I could use.”

Link frowned, scanning the ratty man steadily shuffling toward him. “I’m really not interested in any trades...”

“Who said anything about a trade?” the man said, shaking his head as he pulled a switchblade from his sleeve, snapping it open and letting the sun glint off of its edge. Link’s stomach flipped for the second time that day.

“Stop right there,” Link ordered. “This doesn’t have to—”

He wasn’t exactly sure what he was going to say, nor at what point he was going to pull the trigger on the pepper spray, buying himself a few minutes to run. He hadn’t known where he would go, when he would trust himself to stop, how he would guarantee that he’d be safe from this lunatic once he finally ran out of breath. But all the questions came to a grinding halt with the pop of a discharging pistol off to his right. The man’s jaw fell open as he bent to clutch the fresh wound on his thigh. 

Link’s head whipped to the side just as Edward came out from behind an abandoned truck. Shock and gratitude made for an odd mixture in his chest, and Link was left with nothing to do but laugh. Edward glanced at him and flashed his eyebrows upward in greeting before approaching the bent man. He lifted a foot and knocked the predator to the ground, the knife clattering from his hand. Ed looked to Link, causing him to spring for it while Ed patted down his pockets and found him wanting. 

“What happened to you?” Link asked as Ed stood and crossed toward him. “Why didn’t you go with me?”

“Bet you’re glad I didn’t let you take off with this,” Ed said, ignoring the question as he held a familiar pistol up for Link to see. “Seeing how hesitant you are to use what you’ve got,” he added, glancing pointedly at the pepper spray in Link’s hand. He rolled his eyes and tucked it into the side pocket of his backpack.

“I thought you wanted to talk to someone about—”

“You’re out here alone, so the answer seems obvious, but how’d it go for you in there?”

At this interruption, Link set about his path again, claiming what control he could over the conversation. Ed kept up with him easily, unfazed by the curses spewing from the fallen man behind them and seemingly accustomed to having a back turned on him. He kept on, voice chipper.

“Not well, I guess. I didn’t think so.”

They walked for a full block in silence, footsteps growing marginally quicker with each yard that went by. The pace was tense and teeming with potential energy, anger that had no obvious target pulling at Link until he felt compelled to speak to the only person who had seemed to hear him in the last twenty-four hours.

“What the fuck am I supposed to do? They gave me a map, decided he probably wasn’t in the morgue, and kicked me out. I don’t…how is that ‘serving and protecting’?”

“Somehow I’m not shocked by your disappointment with the experience. Two brains can probably pull together a more logical plan than the whole GCPD. That’s giving you more credit than I know you to deserve, but I’m feeling generous.”

Ed coughed as the folded map was shoved into his chest. “Then _help_ me.”

Their eyes locked in a moment of silence tinged with a perplexing blend of anger, desperation, and amusement. Link took hold of Ed’s hand, forcing him to take the map, then crossed his arms over his chest. 

Edward unfolded the map, already speaking before he even looked down. “If he has any sense at all, he’ll know he can’t make it alone. He’ll be where there are other people, just, apparently, not with the police. The next logical place would be somewhere that strangers can blend in without anyone asking any questions.” He looked to the map, an impish smile overtaking his face as he saw what he was looking for. “We can probably _narrow_ our search perimeter.”

Link stared at him, then gave a sluggish blink.

“The Narrows. We should check there,” Ed huffed, rolling his eyes and taking off for the east.


	13. Tell

With the outside world in a state of dangerous uncertainty, a routine seemed so precious that Rhett’s brain clung to it, savoring whatever he could taste of normalcy. He woke with the sunrise, folded his blankets and stacked them in the corner of his office, changed the bandages on his shoulder until they were no longer necessary, and then spent that time trying to stretch and work muscles that had yet to respond. By the time any activity could be heard in the main chamber of the building, he’d already set to work on his drafting, calculating and sketching, measuring and remeasuring. At some point in the morning, Oswald would stop by to say hello, glance at the desk but not to pry, it seemed, but to simply show Rhett that he hadn’t forgotten about him, tucked away from the activity of the compound as he was. At times, he could hear timid voices offering various reports on supplies, activity happening at the perimeter, updates on police activity in a “green zone.” Oswald often met these reports in good spirits, and Rhett never stopped to wonder if it was the reports that lifted his mood, or if it was the fact that they always came while he was on his way to Rhett’s office. It didn’t matter; he’d heard rumors of what Oswald was like when his mood turned sour, and he had no interest in finding himself at the receiving end of such a disposition.

“Good morning,” Rhett said as soon as Oswald’s shadow came into view at his door. He liked to anticipate the arrival; it seemed to keep Oswald on his toes, and it was the closest he’d come to a game of any sort since he started his job here. Oswald turned the corner of his doorway and leaned fully onto his black cane, accentuating the jut of his right hip.

“Mr. McLaughlin. Busy as ever. Good morning,” he replied, eyes already skimming the surface of Rhett’s workspace. “I need your input on a new project. A more pressing matter, given the unfortunate circumstances under which we’re living,” he announced, a warm ribbon of excitement threading through his voice. He stepped further into the office. 

“I know this may not be your area of expertise,” he started, reaching for the inside pocket of his suit jacket while Rhett’s stomach flipped with anxiety, “but we’ve come into an opportunity too good to pass up. An old factory just a couple blocks to the south has come into our possession, and I believe it would behoove us to make use of it. It produced brass fixtures of some sort, and with the equipment from a machine shop down the street and the powder we…inherited from the city’s armory, well…”

“You want to turn it into an ammunitions factory.”

Oswald offered a closed-lip smile. “These are dangerous times, and my people deserve protection. I just want you all to be safe, should anyone threaten what we’re getting started here,” he answered, eyes turning skyward as he referenced the impressive building in which they’d hunkered down.

Rhett frowned. “What’s that?”

The blink that followed was drawn, and Rhett couldn’t discern whether Oswald needed a moment to find the right words or a nerve had been stricken with the question. He decided on the former when he saw the sparkle in those eyes as they opened again.

“I don’t blame you for asking. We really haven’t had the chance to get to know one another.” He turned toward the doorway, jutting his head out into the hallway and hissing for a chair to be brought in. Within seconds, a young woman with a downcast gaze was depositing a wooden swivel chair near the door. Oswald fluidly lowered himself into it, fingers curling over the ends of the worn armrests.

“I have had my share of differences with those who try to claim authority over this city. I have no quarrel with the spirit of the law, but I admit, the way that it has been enforced in this city has more than once left me taking the fall for others’ crimes. The police have used me as a scapegoat, as have, I’m ashamed to admit, some of this city’s late crime lords. For the few sins I committed as a younger man, corruption and betrayal have followed me like a shadow, and in this place, at the dawning of this new age, dark as it feels today, I plan to finally shake it. I’m going to protect these people in the way I never felt protected. As long as they’re doing their part to contribute to our communal prosperity, I want the people here to feel welcome, encouraged even, to pursue happiness however they see fit. And Mr. McLaughlin, don’t misunderstand me: I am not playing the martyr. I know that I will be rewarded for these efforts. I know my prizes will be handsome: loyalty, safety, creature comforts that those in the so-called green zone may never know again. But for all that I’ve been through, for _my_ willingness to _stay_, I deserve those rewards. And I’d like to know that I will have a circle of trusted advisers with whom to share them. Mr. Penn, for instance, who has worked for me tirelessly, if imperfectly. But…well, if I may be frank, my numbers have dwindled recently. With the fall of the bridges we lost some good men. But something about you strikes a chord in me.”

Rhett blinked quickly, straightening his posture.

“You help me to produce this much-needed ammunition, this unfortunately necessary measure to protect our young and hopeful community, and I will welcome you into that fortified circle. In fact, as a gesture of good faith, I’m inviting you to join the administrative team in the conference room for meals. Of course, you will be rewarded handsomely beyond that once the factory is running.”

Oswald tilted his head and arched an eyebrow to accentuate his proposition. Rhett swallowed, unsure of exactly how to respond to such a weighty offer. He could sense that he did not know exactly what was being asked, that there was more to this suggestion than the words alone had promised, but he couldn’t discern whether the weight of implication had fallen on the request for loyalty or the promise of reward. But the intensity of Oswald’s gaze left him little breath to hold as he made up his mind. His response fell out of him clumsily.

“If…okay, I appreciate that. I can’t see any reason—I just…” he stumbled, shaking his head and laughing at himself, breathing easier the moment he saw Oswald crack a smile at him. “Can I ask you something?”

“Please do.”

“I’ve had this nagging feeling since, well, the whole time I’ve been here, really. I know you’ve already told me, and that you said you wouldn’t do it again, but…I feel like I can’t remember the whole story of what happened to me before you found me,” he started. But he stopped for a moment when it seemed that Oswald’s face, though concretely unchanged, had somehow hardened. “Like I said, I know you and the doctor have gone through it more than once, so it’s not that I think anyone has not been—my point is, it’s me. I know I’m not a lost cause, but I can’t seem to remember even all that I’ve already been told. And I wondered if, since you said you were _there_, you wouldn’t mind telling me the whole story of what seemed to have happened to me just one more time, all the way through. I just know I’m forgetting someone. Something, I mean. I don’t know,” he confessed, laughing once at himself and running his right hand through the waves of hair just starting to fall forward. Whatever chill had crossed between them passed, and Oswald’s eyes softened into an expression of genuine sympathy.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, leaning forward. “I was harsh in what I said before. You _had_ stormed in on me unexpectedly, after all. But you were barely hanging on when we found you. I can’t blame you for forgetting. I’ll tell you what: let’s celebrate the completion of the factory plans with a nice dinner where we can go through it all again. You can ask any questions you want. For now, though,” he added with a distinct tone of closure, “I have to be on my way. Thank you for hearing me out this morning, and for your flexibility in shifting focus in your work for us.”

Oswald stood and crossed to the door, eyeing the chair before glancing over his shoulder. “Keep this chair. Maybe you’ll have future visitors.”

Rhett nodded and watched Oswald disappear down the hall, though his eyes remained on the empty doorway long after his guest had gone.

As soon as he stepped through the massive door to the conference room that evening, Rhett was struggling not to frown at the meager serving of processed meat and creamed corn handed to him by the grizzled leader of Cobblepot’s security detail. He’d recognized the scarred face from his own fruitless patrols, but they did not speak to each other. Few people spoke at all; most just shoveled food into their mouths and left the room as soon as their plates were clear, which did not take long.

One face smiled at him from the far end of the room, though, and he crossed over to her quickly. 

“Hi.”

“First meal among the elites?” she asked, pouring him a glass of water from one of several stainless steel pitchers on the table. He lifted it in gratitude.

“It is. The elites, huh?” he said quietly, skimming the tired faces of his fellow diners. 

She laughed. “Hardly. We’re just the ones who catch the ax first when something goes wrong.” 

“Yikes. Was it naive of me to hope for better food here?” he asked. 

“Let’s see: it’s seven weeks or so we’ve been at this little social experiment, and I think I’ve had three or four days that I didn’t hear my own stomach growling. But leaner rations last longer.”

Rhett could tell by the tone of her voice that she had not fully bought in to the line. He appreciated her willingness to reveal even that much about herself. 

As he took another look at her, his head cocked to the side. “I recognize you, don’t I?” he asked, partially out of truth, partially as a way to maintain a conversation. The young woman tucked a stray hair behind her ear and nodded. 

“You look better than the last time I saw you. You were wild-eyed and dripping blood everywhere. I took you up to the infirmary.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” he replied, remembering how paralyzed she’d seemed when he had approached her that day, when Oswald had approached behind him.

“Looks like it could’ve gone better, huh? Sorry about that,” she offered, looking down at his left arm as it lay motionless on his thigh. He winced.

“Hey, I lived.”

“That’s the spirit.’

A spoonful of unnaturally sweet corn slid down his throat before he directed their talk back to her. The conversation was like a drug, numbing away the sense of isolation that had been gnawing at him as he worked the days away from his little office.

“So you’re not a bellhop anymore?”

She laughed again. “Bellhop. I wish. I was just floating around hoping not to be noticed. I think I still am, but now I have actual responsibilities.”

“Well, you must. Look at your company.”

They glanced at the few stoic faces scattered about the room before chuckling to themselves again. She nodded subtly at some of them.

“He runs the armory, or what will be the armory eventually. That guy to the right is in charge of the fleet of vehicles, mechanic, scheduler, so on. At the far end there is Penn, the head accountant, right-hand go-to guy for Penguin.”

“That name,” Rhett exhaled, shaking his head as he needlessly chewed.

“‘Penn’?”

“No.”

“Oh. You haven’t noticed the penchant for colorful monikers lately? Anyone who’s anyone has some kind of nickname.”

“Really?”

“Penguin, Scarecrow, Firefly, Freeze. Though I think I heard that last one is a homonym. Homophone? Whatever.”

“Where did it come from, ‘Penguin’?”

She narrowed her eyes at him, as if she was missing a joke. When he didn’t continue, she leaned forward. “You haven’t noticed?”

Rhett rolled his eyes and shook his head. “I’d hoped for a better story. Not a very creative people, are you? Using appearances…”

“I didn’t come up with it! I have a gift for nicknames, and I would’ve done much better, thank you very much.”

“Alright, I’ll play along. What would yours be?”

“The Katydid.”

“That’s a bug.”

“Yes. A bug who is very good at camouflage. Blends right in. But can bite if it needs to. And it does double duty: my name is Catherine. Thanks for asking, by the way.”

He looked at her face again, trying to assess her sincerity. She was trying to hide a smirk behind a sip of water, so he returned the volley.

“I’m Rhett, not that you care.”

She dropped her fork onto her empty plate and rested an elbow on the table. “Well, Rhett, something tells me there’s not much of a billing department upstairs, so how does he have you paying off your debt?”

He chewed far longer than necessary, thinking over how to answer the question. It rattled around in his chest like a threat, warning him that discretion was likely the safest option. 

“I’m not sure I should…I’m trying to, um…I was an engineer a while back, so…”

She held up her hand to stop him. “It’s okay. Don’t tell me anything you shouldn’t. I’d rather just go about my business without knowing what kind of excitement might be coming down the line.”

“And what is your business?” he asked, grimacing against another mouthful of yellow mush.

“I’m in charge of the food supply.”

He froze, eyes unblinking against her painfully friendly stare. 

“I’m not doing a great job.”

The tension broke, and they laughed to themselves as quietly as they could. He felt like a child trying not to catch the attention of the much sterner adults in the room, and this sensation made the laughter all the more thrilling. She wiped her eyes and collected her own plate and cup, pushing her chair back from the table.

“Thanks for actually talking to me,” she said. “Maybe I’ll see you at breakfast.”

“Sure thing. What’s on the menu?” he teased.

“Oh, fresh ground coffee, as always, bagels with cream cheese, tomato, lox, capers. A fresh fruit spread. It’ll be delightful.” As she crossed behind him on her way to the door, she added just loud enough for him to catch, “Just not for any of _us_.”

The words initially made him snicker, but as the night went on, he found them hanging around the back of his mind, causing him to wonder in his moments of idleness whether Oswald wasn’t already reaping some noticeable rewards. It had been hard not to notice how stringently clean and sharply dressed the man always was, even while a uniform of jumpsuits was slowly spreading across the rest of City Hall’s population. Still, Rhett had to remind himself from the comfort of his own office, he’d never said this place was a democracy. And as much as he valued having his own voice, Rhett returned over and over to the conclusion that more stern leadership, at least in Oswald’s hands, truly could be for the best.

* * *

Oswald could feel his heart beating in his chest as he made his way down the long corridor. With each step, he had to push away images of Butch just after he’d been offered up to a shadowy doctor of his own, rewired for loyalty. He gritted his teeth against flashes of calloused hands strapping him to a chair deep within Arkham, electrocuting the criminal tendencies out of his body. Of course, even in this state of agitation, his memory was selective: he did not concern himself with the impermanence of either procedure’s results.

All that mattered was that he’d seen it work before.

The door to the infirmary was already mostly opened, but Oswald shoved it with the heel of his hand just to hear it clatter against the wall. The young doctor was reading through a slim folder of notes, and the violent entrance caused him to flinch, dropping the file and sending papers scattering. 

“Mr. Cobblepot! What can—”

Oswald jutted the far end of his cane into the doctor’s chest, silencing him.

“You told me he’d be a blank slate. He wasn’t supposed to remember anything we didn’t tell him about the injury or that insufferable—”

“With all due respect, I said it _could_ work. I mean, I’m not a neurosurgeon. I didn’t really have any experience with rewiring a-a-person’s…well, a brain. But you said to go ahead.”

Oswald narrowed his eyes, lowering the cane. “You were more certain at the time. He _still_ feels like we didn’t tell him about something. Particularly, some_one_.”

“I could talk to him,” the doctor offered with a desperate shrug. Oswald let his own shoulders drop at the ridiculousness of the idea, but he said nothing as a way to force his employee to consider the absurdity of the suggestion. Eventually, he caved.

“Yeah, I don’t know what I’d say. But whatever you want to do—”

“There’s no way to get back in his head, is there?”

The doctor thought, but frowned. “What would I say to talk him into that? And honestly, even if we could, I don’t know what else I’d do. I’m afraid we’re stuck with the results we have.”

“Oh, we are, are _we_?” Oswald sniped back, resorting to rolling his eyes when he ran out of words. 

“I could take another look at his arm, if you’d like. We could go back in—”

Oswald shook his head, cutting off whatever suggestion was coming. “Not yet. Let’s see how it goes first. If this turns out to be salvageable and he still isn’t making physical progress, we’ll discuss those options. I’ll want something heavy. Or sharp. Both, preferably.”

“Understood.” Just as the doctor was agreeing, a burst of gunfire erupted outside the window behind him. He ducked out of instinct, but Oswald just stepped around him to look through the glass. On the other side of a newly-constructed barricade, a gang clad in black leather had gathered, led by a broad-shouldered man who was calling for a leader. Oswald cranked the window open just an inch and lowered his head to listen.

“This looks like an awfully well-protected place, but even you don’t know how many of us are waiting in the shadows. I want to talk to whoever is in charge! You have two minutes to send him out!”

“Or what?” Oswald replied under his breath as he turned and made his way toward the door, accidentally bumping the doctor and not bothering to apologize.

The moment he set foot at the top of the grand staircase, Oswald felt a sea of nervous eyes fall on him, waiting for some direction. He cleared his throat and met the gazes of as many of his armed guards as he could find in the room below. 

“You may be feeling understandably anxious at the unexpected arrival of our neighbors, especially since we aren’t exactly prepared to host such a crowd,” he announced, trying to recall the last set of numbers he’d seen from the armory report and finding it wanting. “But not to worry: the situation is under control. We will simply let them know we cannot accept their generous offer of conversation…nor will we be intimidated into handing over an _ounce_ of what we’ve acquired over the last few weeks! Security,” he barked, descending the stairs, “meet me at the foyer. Everyone else, return to work.”

When he reached the main entryway, a guard was just closing the front doors after glancing out into the street. His face was puzzled, but before he could speak, the team’s leader addressed Oswald directly while three other guards listened in, each readying their own rifles.

“No one seems to have run into these guys before. We got men on the roof, at the gate, and in windows on both sides of the street. Limited ammo but good vantage points. Could make a good dent if we don’t wipe ‘em out entirely in one round.”

“Has anyone reported vehicles in the area? What’re the odds they’re bluffing about having more men?” he asked. The team looked to one another and shook their heads.

“Nothing, sir. But we are thin on the east, for what it’s worth.”

“Excuse me? Why are we—” Oswald started, stuttering out in frustration as he refocused. “We’ll return to that question. I don’t feel talking to these idiots,” he said, waving his hand to give the order. 

“Sir, any orders on the man in the street?” the doorman uttered before the team could break out in action.

He just wanted to be done with this intrusion, so Oswald couldn’t help but roll his eyes again and sigh. “Who?”

“I don’t know—someone went out just before you came down, looks like.”

“That’s his problem. I didn’t tell anyone to—”

“They’re not moving yet,” a lookout called from a second-floor window. “Our guy is talking to their loudmouth.”

Oswald mentally scanned his roster of recruits, looking for someone who could accurately represent him, and found that he did not trust any of the people Mr. Penn had recently introduced to him to effectively handle his particular brand of diplomacy. The more charismatic members of his crew were long gone.

“Well, when this inevitably backfires, shoot them. If whoever is out there thinks he’s letting them in, shoot him, too.”

A thick silence pervaded the building, teasing his ears as he strained to hear any signs of movement outside. It went on for a full minute, one that seemed to last a few hours, before the lookout’s voice called out. At the sound of it, Oswald instinctively anticipated a rush of movement toward the door, and he slid back out of the way to let his team by. But no one moved.

“Looks like they’re lowering their weapons. Loudmouth jabbed our guy, but…yeah, they’re turning around. Leaving. We’re clear.”

The relieved crowd dissipated from the foyer, but Oswald remained, both hands resting atop his cane as he awaited the return of his apparent ambassador. He pinched the bridge of his nose as he prepared to address an arrogant kid who undoubtedly thought he was cut out for leadership. Those were always the most dangerous types. 

But when the door opened and a lean, unarmed body slipped through, Oswald’s head tilted up to meet its face, and he couldn’t help but laugh, just once, surprised and amused at the sight of Rhett closing the heavy door behind him and leaning against it, eyes wide and distant, as if he himself could hardly believe what he’d just done. 

Oswald sprung into motion, ushering Rhett down the hall, ducking them both away from the invasive eyes of their people. They came to Rhett’s office and Oswald guided him in, closing the door behind them. Rhett dropped into the nearest chair, and Oswald leaned back against the front of the desk, facing him. He let Rhett float in his daze a moment longer before snapping him out of it. 

“Care to explain?”

Rhett blinked and swallowed, clearing his throat before he spoke. “They’re the Lo Boyz.”

“And they wanted to speak to the person in charge. So who did you say _you_ were?”

Rhett understood the implication immediately, and he shook his head quickly. “I didn’t say anything. If he knows you’re in charge here, he didn’t say so. He wants food and ammunition for his gang.”

“To which you said ‘no.’”

“Kind of.”

Oswald’s eyes narrowed. Rhett continued.

“There are at least twice as many of us as there are of them. I told them so, and said food was just not possible. But ammo…might be doable soon. If they were willing to leave with nothing today, we’d offer them a thousand rounds as soon as we have it.”

“So they know our plans for the factory.”

“They do. And they think it’s six blocks north of here.”

Oswald crossed his arms and let himself smile. “That’ll work for a while, I guess. One last question.”

Rhett ran his hand over his face and then once through his hair as he came back to himself in full. His eyes were clearer when he finally looked back up at Oswald, and their vibrancy caught him off guard. 

“Um…what the hell were you thinking going out there on your own?”

The question went without an answer for a long pause as Rhett took a deep breath and shook his head again. “I don’t know. I just heard the commotion, I heard them calling for…well, for you, and I just went. It was like one big reflex that I don’t really…I don’t understand. You’re going to laugh at me…”

“I promise that I won’t,” Oswald coaxed, dropping his arms to his sides in an attempt at a more welcoming posture.

“Maybe it’s because you saved my life by letting me come here, but I just got this feeling that I could _not_ let you go out there. I wanted to…I guess, protect you? As if I’m in any shape…” Rhett suggested, laughing through the end of the thought to try to lighten the atmosphere. It didn’t work. Instead, Oswald stared openly at him, biting his lip as he subtly nodded to himself.

“Mr. McLaughlin,” he said, stepping forward and clasping his hand over Rhett’s right shoulder, “I truly appreciate your instincts.”


	14. Offers

“How much farther?” Link asked quietly, startling Edward by breaking an hour-long silence. They’d long since crossed an old bridge into the Narrows, and the eerie quiet of the city’s most rundown sector was shaking Link’s confidence in their plan. The sun had already disappeared behind the city’s western skyline, and he wanted to be indoors. 

Rather than answer, though, Ed halted in the middle of an intersection and peered at the buildings rising out of the sidewalks on either side. He examined all 360 degrees of the landscape, and just before Link could voice his concerns, he sighed with relief and took off again, leading them to a long alley that ended in an iron staircase and a sign spray-painted on the brick above a door: “Cherry’s.”

“This is it. I know this building. I know there are places to sleep here,” Ed explained through delighted laughter, testing the doorknob and finding it locked, as he seemed to have expected. “There’s roof access if we need it. There may still be a medical office. And,” he added, retrieving a familiar set of hairpins from his pocket, “I can lock the place down once we’re in. Oh my god, I remembered it. There is hope yet…”

“What was this place?”

“The best this neighborhood could muster: binge drinking, illegal gambling, and ruthless fighting. In that order.”

“You don’t think people gathered here? They probably won’t appreciate us breaking in—”

“No. I doubt anyone is staying _here_. There’s an apartment building just down the block that would be far more comfortable.”

Just as Link glanced back up the alley, the door clicked open, creaking on its hinges as Ed slipped inside. 

The hallway into which they’d entered was dark and tight, its rough cement walls seemingly reaching out for the shoulders of passersby, but the atmosphere could not drag down the smile on Ed’s face. He tapped doorknobs as he counted the rooms they passed.

“This is a bathroom. That’s a janitor’s closet. Probably hasn’t been opened in years. This is a stockroom for the bar. This one is…”

Link nearly bumped into his back as he froze in front of a door with a white medical cross spray painted over it. 

“Doc,” Link read from the nameplate nailed to the wooden door frame.

“Yeah,” Ed answered, shaking something from his head and continuing on. “Rooms are this way.”

They came to an unmarked door and Ed pushed it open cautiously, smiling at what he found inside: a well-made twin bed, a dresser missing one of its drawers, a full-length mirror with a bowler hat hung from its corner.

“I stayed here,” he said.

Link nodded. “That’s good to know.” He wondered what a residence in this part of town, in this particular building, said about the man, but he pushed the thought aside for the prospect of getting some rest of his own. 

“There’s a bed for me?” Link asked hopefully as Edward crossed to the bed and sat heavily at its foot.

“Should be the next door down across the hall.”

“Thanks.”

Link kept moving, leaving Ed to the daze that was starting to take him over. Part of him resisted leaving the amnesiac alone; a larger part just needed some sleep.

He found the other makeshift bedroom easily and almost laughed when he stepped inside. This one was larger, likely once belonging to the owner of the place, or at least to someone who had the money for creature comforts like a queen sized bed filled with plush pillows, thick red curtains over the window, and a crystal lamp on the bedside table. He couldn’t totally understand why Ed would have wanted the smaller room, but he stopped caring the moment he sank into the mattress.

“You seem to know your way around here pretty well. Maybe someone here will be able to help you, too. You can’t just be totally disconnected,” Link said, pocketing the wrapper to a protein bar Ed had found in the tiny kitchen at Cherry’s. Their breakfast had been quick and quiet, an exchange of a gritty bar for a bottle of water as they agreed to explore a region Ed had called The Flea.

Ed had frowned at what must have seemed an unlikely prospect: someone recognizing him in _this_ part of town. 

“Maybe. There,” he said, nodding at a group of stalls making up the corner of a city block. The run-down market, void of any merchants, wrapped around the corner and went on for as far as Link could see. He nearly missed Ed’s gesture to follow as he took in the sight of the old stalls.

They wove through shacks and tables and found their way to the actual building at the center of the block, an old indoor market that offered prime real estate to those who could fight hard enough for it. 

The pair stood still at the entrance as their eyes adjusted to the interior’s darkness. As they peered into the corners of the main level, Link noted a handful of groups circled up in separate regions. He looked for the most welcoming of the dirty, tired faces; it was not easy to choose a starting place. But he opted to move from left to right, and took off for the far side of the building. 

He’d mastered the speech: his description of Rhett, the story of how they became separated, his trip to the safe zone. Ed stayed close behind him, watching the interest drain from face after face as they listened to Link for a moment, then turned back to their own private idleness with a shrug or gentle shake of the head. It went on this way circle after circle, group after group, until the disinterest finally seeped under Ed’s skin and grated his nerves. If they wouldn’t help a man who knew his own story, there was little chance they’d help one who didn’t.

The little bit of food they had found in the kitchen at Cherry’s seemed too precious to offer, and he doubted Link would part with anything in his backpack, so when they had approached their eighth distrustful face, an older woman with eyes ringed in gray, he had grown frustrated and blurted out, “What could you possibly have to lose by telling us who you’ve seen walking around here? Just tell us what you’ve seen!”

To this, the woman he’d harassed frowned and crossed her arms, countering, “It’s not what I have to lose, but who I could gain. I’ve been asking these same questions about my sons, asking everyone I can, and no one has known how to help me, either. You’re not cops, you don’t have your own men, you got nothing to offer me. Why should I help until you do?”

Link recoiled, running a hand through his hair as he considered her response. Ed had already rolled his eyes and walked off, but Link was not ready to go. Instead, he took a knee next to the woman.

“Okay. I hear you. We’ve been abandoned here, all of us. And there is no good way for us to find our people. So let’s make one.”

He took off his pack and unzipped a side pocket, pulling out a small notebook and a pen. Turning to a blank page, he said, “Tell me about them. Your sons. What are their names, what do they look like, and where did you last see them?”

And in this way, he began collecting stories, jotting down the most notable details about the people who had gone missing from the lives of those stuck in the Narrows. He took the names of those to whom he spoke, wrote down backup locations where they could be found should he come across their loved ones. In an hour, he’d retraced his steps in the market and gathered three full pages worth of names and descriptions. Ed watched on from near the entrance, arms crossed over his chest as he leaned against a column. With no more stories to collect, Link was placing his notebook back in his bag when he glanced at his new companion and turned back to the group that had formed around him. 

“One more question, and I know it’s a long shot…Does anyone recognize him? He was in an accident of some kind, and his memory is…damaged.”

Blank stare after blank stare turned away from him as people returned to their respective circles and settled back in until only the woman with missing sons remained. 

“I don’t know him, but I do remember him helping out the Doc before it all went to shit. He had some kind of club around here somewhere, but I never went in there to see it.”

“He ran a club?” Link replied, glancing back in surprise at Ed, who must have sensed he was their topic of discussion, as he dropped his arms and tilted his head to the side.

“Not for long, I don’t think. But when those two worked together, he and Doc…They were doing good work keeping their people as fed and healthy as they could. First I’ve seen of either of ‘em, so I’d say he’s probably on his own, bless his heart. Take care of him, will you?”

Link slipped his bag back on and nodded. “Sure, of course. Thanks for your help. I’ll keep an eye out for your boys and send them your way.”

“And I’ll look out for yours.”

They smiled at one another, exhausted smiles that bespoke barely any hope at all, but the exchange left him feeling just a bit lighter. 

“I admit I’m curious what you told these people to get them to talk to you,” Ed said as Link approached the door. He pushed off his column and met Link’s stride, holding open the door for him.

“She was right: we weren’t offering anything. This doesn’t seem to be the kind of place where people do things out of the goodness of their hearts, so I guess it’s not surprising that she wouldn’t want to talk to me.”

Ed glanced over at Link. “So what did you offer? Not your surgical skills, I hope.”

Link laughed, seeming to catch them both off guard. Ed ventured a smile in return.

“I just offered my attention. I asked about the people they were missing, and I’m going to watch for them. It’s all I could do.”

Entirely by one moment of inspiration, this is how they then spent day after day; Edward led Link around the island, Link talked to anyone who would listen, and then listened to anyone who would talk, filling his notebook with names and descriptions of missing people and the ones left behind. He grew accustomed to the sound of Ed’s oxfords on the concrete next to him, the way he would scan a building’s windows for inhabitants before opening a door, the shifts in his mood that usually preceded the announcement that they needed to throw in the towel on a street, a block, or a day. When such a time came, they made their way in silence back to Cherry’s, where Ed picked the back door’s lock, let them in, and disappeared into his own room for an hour or so before roaming out to the kitchenette where Link would already be sitting at a counter, scanning his notes, comparing early pages to later ones, looking for connections. They ate what they could gather from storefronts; piece by piece, Link shared what he’d stuffed in his backpack for himself and Rhett from the pharmacy where Ed had lain bleeding out, trying to stitch himself back together. 

A week passed. Then two. Notes gathered in the book, and Link studied them, occasionally ending his days with a small sense of accomplishment as he crossed off pairs of names.

On the Tuesday of the third week—so said the notes he’d thought to date—, he felt like he had the pages memorized, that rereading them would do him no more good, so he took off for another pitiful dinner and left the book in his room, save for one carefully-removed sheet.

He sat at the worn counter, debating whether to open a package of crackers before Edward appeared. Hunger won out over manners, and he opened the plastic packaging by tearing it cleanly along its seams. The fingers of his left hand rested atop the single sheet of paper, folded in perfect halves, and every so often, they tapped atop blue lines, eager to push them across the counter as a meager offering of thanks for Ed’s help. 

Halfway through the pack of crackers, though, Link felt himself growing anxious in Ed’s absence. They’d set a routine, and he wasn’t following it.

Link folded the plastic package closed and stood, tucking it into a cabinet before taking off back down toward the bedrooms. 

“Hello? Ed? You in here?” he called out, poking his head into the medical office and then the storage closet before reaching Ed’s door. It was unlatched, so he knocked gently on the jamb. 

“You want to eat anything?”

When he got no response, he pushed the door open slowly and frowned. The room was empty. 

And within two short minutes, he’d learned that the rest of the building was empty, too.

Link returned to his room and sat on the edge of his bed, elbows resting on his knees as he caught his breath and tried to make sense of the disappearance. They hadn’t fought; they hadn’t run out of supplies. Their hideout hadn’t been threatened. He was just gone.

Sleep skipped over Cherry’s that evening. Link found his way up to the roof and watched the streets below until the night grew too cold; then he lay on a sofa near the bar on the lower level reading an old magazine, waiting for his eyelids to grow heavy. They never did. 

He wandered the building, exploring the few remaining spaces he hadn’t already scoured: a betting booth with a ransacked cash box, the boxing ring itself, and eventually, a locker room that still smelled of stale sweat and something more metallic. On the top shelf of one of the lockers, he found a stack of discarded fliers and pulled one down for a better grasp of what the place used to be.

“The Undefeated Solomon Grundy,” Link read, “fights every Friday and Saturday.” At the center of the page was a photo of a fighter so massive that he dwarfed the man raising his arm in victory at the center of the ring, dark circles lining his eyes, and hair that looked white in the flier’s grayscale. He lifted his hand to put the paper back, but as quickly as he’d raised it, he pulled it back down for a second look. 

Holding up the giant’s arm, beaming out at the wild crowd swarming the ring, was Edward.

Link shook his head and folded the paper in quarters, shoving it into his pocket before rummaging through the rest of the locker, suddenly hoping to find some more evidence of the life Ed had lived before he’d been attacked. 

When nothing more surfaced in the locker room, he made his way back to the rear hallway. He’d meant to give up on the evening, but rather than turning right into his room, he found himself taking the few extra steps to the door on the left.

He switched on the bedside lamp and stood in the center of the room, perfectly still, listening for any indication that Ed might be in the building, but he knew better. Permission came in the building’s silence, and he made his way to the dresser, starting at the top, thumbing through dark socks and underwear, all crisply folded and arranged in neat rows. At the back of the drawer, his fingers landed on an old wallet. He pulled it out, careful not to disturb the garments that had covered it, and rested his arms on top of the dresser to examine its contents.

Link quickly decided that Edward had not yet rediscovered this wallet. There were too many forms of identification left inside for him to not know who he’d been, the most forefront, an old driver’s license.

“Nygma. There’s a name,” Link muttered, pulling out the license and revealing another card tucked behind it. 

“GCPD…forensics,” he read, turning the card to read what had been punched out of its plastic: INACTIVE.

The photograph on the card made Link chuckle: Ed appeared young and far too enthused to be working at the department, face pulled into a wide, earnest smile. 

On the opposite side of the wallet were nested several more cards that spoke to the man’s past: a long-expired card for the central city library, a white calling card for a tailor, and a thick, dark business card that was resting at a slight angle in the bill pocket. The wallet dropped from his fingers as he removed it, and he flinched at the sound. 

“No way…” he whispered, moving toward the lamp and holding the matte card flat in his palm, as if it might come alive the moment he confirmed his suspicion. Silver script shimmered back at him, and he ran a hand through his hair.

“What were _you_ doing at the Iceberg Lounge?” he asked his own perception of Ed. He couldn’t help laughing at how quickly one card could completely distort the image he’d been building of his makeshift partner. More than anything, the thought of Ed mingling among the city’s Beautiful People amused him. He felt the urge to tease him about it, but of course, he couldn’t. And that thought swept the smile from his face. 

He had no reason to believe it was anything but temporary, but it didn’t matter: he was on his own. In this rundown building, on this forsaken island, in this apparent war zone of a city, he was alone.

The realization swelled through him like ice water, freezing in his veins from the ground up. He shivered and drew his arms to his chest, tucking his hands against his neck to keep them warm. It didn’t work. Instead, the cold wracked him, a tangible manifestation of anxieties he’d been trying to suppress.

Whether he’d walked himself or been dragged away, Rhett was gone, a needle flung into the urban haystack. This knowledge ached in Link’s chest; when it came upon him in the darkest hour of every night, the incursion knocked the air from his body and left him gritting his teeth in its wake. All that helped him catch his breath was the caveat of Edward, the one barrier between him and complete isolation, complete disorientation. 

From some corner of his body, he was rolling his eyes at the melodrama already surging through him. He’d only been alone for maybe four hours, mostly without his awareness, and yet he was already nearing complete paralysis. On better days, he would laugh at himself, roll the shadows off his shoulders, and throw himself back into whatever work was waiting. But against his will, he’d been flung over some invisible line, and going back to the man he was seemed impossible. He was unanchored.

And he was alone.

Edward’s bed creaked softly under his weight as he lay on his side, facing the exposed brick wall and drawing the comforter up around his arms. The pillow smelled of soap and some post-shave astringent. He’d never noticed it on Ed before, but he’d been too occupied to care. Now, he burrowed the side of his nose into the smell, sinking his face against a thin collection of feathers. He’d quite enjoyed his own bedding; he wanted better for Ed. 

He pulled off his glasses, tossed them to the farthest edge of the bed and succumbed to his own heaviness. Surviving on his own seemed a daunting challenge. Finding Rhett, an impossible one. The loss choked him, and he sobbed once, silently forcing every bit of the ache to the surface as his stomach clenched, and when his body finally cried for oxygen, he drew it slowly between pursed lips for fear of hyperventilation. 

This cycle repeated twice more, until his body couldn’t hold the tension any longer. His muscles went slack, and he wiped warm tears from his face, settling his hands under his cheek and drifting into an uneasy sleep.


End file.
